I graduated as mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary,
in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI I joined the Hungarian
research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where I worked for 6 years (and turned
into a computer scientist…). I left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry
in Munich, Germany, I joined the Centre Mathematics & Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam
where I have had a tenure position since 1988. I received a PhD degree in Computer
Science in 1990 at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. I joined the W3C
Team as Head of W3C Offices in January 2001 while maintaining my position at CWI.
I served as Head of Offices until June 2006, then as Semantic Web Activity Lead until
December 2013. Since June of 2013, I have been Digital Publishing Activity Lead.
Before joining W3C I worked in quite different areas (distributed and dataflow programming,
language design, system programming), but I spend most of my research years in computer
graphics and information visualization. I also participated in various graphics related
ISO standardization activities and software developments. My separate “professional”
home page contains a list of my publications, my public presentations, and details
of the various projects I participated in the past.
In my previous life (i.e., before joining W3C…) I was member of the Executive Committee
of the Eurographics Association for 15 years, and I was vice-chair of the Association
between 2000 and 2002. Between autumn 2007 and 2014 I was member of SWSA (Semantic
Web Science Association), the committee responsible for the International Semantic
Web Conferences series, and I was also on the Board of Directors of Force11 between
2011 and 2015. I was the co-chair of the 9th World Wide Web Conference, in Amsterdam,
May 2000; since then, I have also been member of IW3C2 (International World Wide Web
Conference Committee), responsible for the World Wide Web Conference series.
I have also developed some software (in Python) that might be of interest. An example
is an SPARQL 1.0 API, a (partial) implementation on the top the RDFLib package. This
package has then been added to RDFLib with a proper SPARQL language parser contributed
by the community. I have also developed a RDFa Distiller service, i.e., a Python implementation
of RDFa 1.1, a similar tool for the conversion of microdata to RDF. The RDFa and Microdata
packages (both are also available on GitHub) are also part of the core RDFLib package
as parser plugins. I also developed a small package to interface SPARQL queries from
Python; this software has been moved to GitHub, and is maintained by Sergio Fernández
and Carlos Tejo Alonso (CTIC, Spain). I am also co-author of the GraphML Specification,
one of the de-facto standard exchange formats for graph visualization packages.
