Introduction: Benjamin Nowack

Hi outreachers,

My name is Benjamin Nowack, I've just been invited to the group
and I'm truly impressed by the offer. I hope I'll be able to 
contribute as expected.

My background: front-ends ;) I never really liked computers and
considered them mostly as sneaky attention sinks perpetually
giving you an illusive "almost there" feeling, always demanding
"just a little bit more time". Favourite quote: "Let's quickly
do it with the computer".

The Web's HTML dragged me into Software development in 1995 as
it offered this instant gratification and immediate creative 
possibilities I didn't see in programming languages and the like.
I followed the common slippery slope with stops at JavaScript, 
Perl, ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP/MySQL. Also learned a bit graphic
design. But the me-against-geekdom game was more or less lost
when I started looking at RDF.

Now I'm spending way too much of my time building SemWeb 
systems[1], tools[2], and apps[3] suited for average Web
developers like me. It's still the "almost there" state, but 
I'm finally starting to experience the productivity boost RDF
infrastructure promises, and I think the timing for SWEO 
couldn't be better, esp. now with SPARQL mature enough for 
deployment.

Personal sweo activities: a workshop and some talks in Germany
this year, slowly moving away from research-y stuff towards more
trendy topics. Next big event (with great outreach potential) is
going to be the german webinale[4] where I am invited to talk
about the "Dream Team Web 2.0 and Semantic Web".

Most successful outreach activity so far: wearing the
SWAD-E/FOAF t-shirt at this year's DrupalCon. You can't imagine
how many people asked what RDF is about and where I got the 
cool shirt from ;)

I graduated at Wuerzburg University of Applied Sciences in 
Germany (BA, major Info Management), and currently work from 
Essen in the "Ruhr Valley" as an individual developer.

IRC nick: bengee (#swig, #foaf, #microformats)

Looking forward to SWEOing,
Ben

[1] http://semsol.com/
[2] http://arc.web-semantics.org/
[3] http://rdfer.com/
[4] http://webinale.de/

--
Benjamin Nowack
http://www.bnode.org/

Received on Wednesday, 20 December 2006 13:15:01 UTC