Ivan's Blog

To my great surprise I was asked by the management of W3C to change my current position as Head of the W3C Offices to become Activity Lead for the Semantic Web (which is the W3C jargon for the person coordinating the Semantic Web activities at W3C), starting 1^st of June. The reason: Eric Miller, who was the Activity Lead until now, decided to move on to another job outside of W3C…

Eric came to work at W3C more or less when I did, i.e., in January 2001. Anybody remember what the Semantic Web looked like at the time? There was a version of RDF around with no clear semantics, and with a document that mixed up the model and its XML representation; people were talking about DAML and OIL and DAML+OIL but it was not clear at all how that would work with what was already around in terms of RDF… Today, we have a greatly cleaned up version of RDF, DAML+OIL has been turned into OWL, we almost have SPARQL, we have GRDDL, RDFa, Rules, and SKOS in preparation, let alone the uptake of the Semantic Web in terms of tools, cute demonstration and, yes, serious applications. The various working groups that have produced all this did a really great job; but we should also not forget that all this happened under Eric’s watch, so to say. His contribution in this area is enormous and all of us who care about this field should be grateful to him.

Taking Eric’s job is… scary, I am not ashamed to say that. If I can achieve only a fraction of what he could do, I will be satisfied with myself. I will certainly try, and future will tell whether I will be successful…

On a more personal note: Eric was not only a colleague at W3C but is also a friend. I will loose a colleague, but friendship remains; and that is what really counts!