Introduction: Alberto Reggiori, Asemantics S.r.l

hello world! :)

my name is Alberto Reggiori, I am italian and I am currently a partner 
of Asemantics S.r.l [1] a start up company working on Semantic Web 
technologies and solutions having offices in Italy and the Netherlands. 
And recently joined the W3C.

I have been working on Web technologies since 1995 either as consultant 
for small italian companies and as contractor for the Join Research 
Center (JRC) of EC. My background is in informatics and I have been 
mainly a UNIX programmer in various programming languages (C, C++, 
Perl, Java, PHP and others) and environments, and I contributed to some 
open-source and public domain projects; I worked on databases, GIS and 
XML and their integration with the Web. Since 1999 I have been involved 
in the RDF movement and I have been developing RDFStore [2], and 
open-source and native Semantic Web storage toolkit which deals with 
RDF directly and which can do RDQL [3] queries. The toolkit includes 
RDF/XML and N-Triples parsers. RDQL has also been extended in several 
ways to include more advanced features as required by Web applications 
I have been developing in the past months.

In the past months I have been also involved and contributed a little 
bit to the SWAD-e project and to the earlier RDF query activity; on 
that I have been collaborating with Andy Seaborne, Libby Miller and Dan 
Brickley et al. to build a set of RDF query interoperability tests 
[4][5] and a RDF Query & Rules  languages survey [6], which I still 
actively maintain.

I am currently based in Italy, north of Milan, where I live and work. 
The best way to talk to me is email, even if sporadically I might pop 
up on the RDFIG IRC channel [7] too - I am generally not too quick in 
email replies even though I try to keep up with threads of interest :) 
The best is to ping me with an email before when you need me be either 
online or on the phone - or to remind me things I might have not 
fulfilled/done.

I am very much glad to be part of this working group and I am happy to 
see such an effort coming together after some other fruitful work 
already done in the past. It is in my hope that this WG will provide 
some basic but very effective work and specifications to enable people 
to use and leverage more on RDF and related technologies. I personally 
see the discovery, query and retrieval aspects of an RDF query language 
as of vital importance for the upcoming new Web. I would expect that 
the result of our work to be of fundamental relevance and importance 
for the Web as whole and it would easy collaboration and 
interoperability with other parties. Last by not least, I would like 
this group trying to focus on getting a basic core specification out 
soon, implement it and extend and improve it later as necessary; this 
is probably the best approach to give us credibility and get other 
people more involved in our work and get feedback soon. And at the same 
time I feel like important to try to tackle the problem from the right 
side, find the right architectural compromises, without trying to solve 
all the world problems in one go :-)

My very first concern of the RDF Data Access work is to provide a 
simple but very effective protocol/language to discover, query and 
retrieve RDF, which must be easily to implement and to understand. It 
is of vital importance that any syntax or specification we are going to 
provide will build on existing standards and protocols already 
deployed, to guarantee the best acceptance in the community and 
interoperability. Simple pull/select functionality is definitively at 
the core of our work to enable a more advanced Data Manipulation 
Language (DML) to be build on top of it later. Having the right 
extension points is also a key in our work to be evolvable and being 
reused in others/similar contexts.

Even though I met some of the people of this WG in Cannes last week for 
the W3C TP meeting, I am looking forward to have soon a face-to-face 
meeting to talk about the WG work and exchange ideas about it.

all the best

Alberto

http://foaf.asemantics.com/alberto

[1] http://www.asemantics.com
[2] http://rdfstore.sourceforge.net
[3] http://www.w3.org/Submission/2004/SUBM-RDQL-20040109/
[4] http://www.w3.org/2003/03/rdfqr-tests/
[5] http://www.w3.org/2003/03/rdfqr-tests/rdf-query-testcases.html
[6] http://rdfstore.sourceforge.net/2002/06/24/rdf-query/
[7] irc://irc.freenode.net:6667/rdfig

Received on Wednesday, 10 March 2004 18:47:51 UTC