Dan Brickley Introduction

Hi all,

Just a quick intro note to say how pleased I am to have the RDF Core WG
and W3C's Semantic Web Activity finally underway, and how I'm looking
forward to working with you all on getting the core RDF specs cleaned up,
tested and finalised.


(bit of background....)
I've been involved with the W3C RDF effort since meeting Ralph Swick and
Eric Miller in 1997, and as an implementor I've had a love-hate relationship
with RDF ever since. There is a simple and very appealing  elegance to
RDF, sometimes obscured by various subtle and tricky issues that face
implementors trying to deploy real-world RDF/XML apps. We now face the
challenging task of figuring out which of those implementation headaches
we can solve, which will be addressed by other groups and specifications,
and which simply 'come with the territory'. The RDF Core WG's charter was
carefully drafted to address some of the tradeoffs we'll be facing. I
believe we'll find running code and concrete test-cases enormously useful
in this task, and encourage all WG members to always try to couch our
technical discussions in terms of test cases. I hope that the work of this
group, as it evolves, can be usefully connected to the implementation work
of others from the RDF Interest Group. My intended role, co-chairing this
WG with Brian, is in large part as a bridge to the RDF Interest
Group and Semantic Web developer community. I'm hoping we can pick off
some quick early wins, essentially errata for RDF M+S, and make a lot of
Web developers lives easier in the short term. I know from working with
RDF at ILRT and at W3C that it is a really useful technology. It's about
time we made that obvious to anyone who encounters it...


Oh, a bit about me. I'm lucky enough (fool enough...) to be working as
part of _two_ pretty cool teams involved with XML/RDF and the Semantic
Web. I mostly work and live in Bristol (UK) where I'm employed at
University of Bristol, and work with others at ILRT on various RDF-related
& digital library projects. If you've come across Libby, Jan, Dave's or
various other ILRT folks work you'll know why this has been great fun.
Since 1999 I've also been working part of my week on the W3C team, and
spending a fair amount of time at W3C's MIT site in Boston and working
virtually as a W3C team member. Fun too :)

I'm about to jump on a plane to Kong Kong (WWW10) so that's about it for
now. If I'm online and working I can often be found on the RDF Interest
Group IRC channel, http://www.w3.org/RDF/Interest/#irc so feel free to pop
in there if you want to chat about any aspects of RDFCore WG, RDF IG etc.

cheers,

Dan

RDF Core Working Group co-chair
RDF Interest Group chair
RDF Schema co-editor

--
ILRT/W3C mailto:danbri@w3.org
http://www.w3.org/People/DanBri/
http://ilrt.org/people/danbri/

Received on Tuesday, 24 April 2001 19:12:00 UTC