Ivan Herman

Ivan Herman graduated as mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI I, he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years and turned into a computer scientist. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry in Munich, Germany, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he has held a tenure position since 1988. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. Ivan joined the W3C Team as Head of W3C Offices in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI. He served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when he was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position, which is now his principal work at W3C.Before joining W3C he worked in quite different areas, but spent most of his research years in computer graphics and information visualization. He also participated in various graphics related ISO standardization activities and software developments.Prior to joining W3C, he was member of the Executive Committee of the Eurographics Association for 15 years, and was vice-chair of the Association between 2000 and 2002. He was the co-chair of the 9th World Wide Web Conference, in Amsterdam, May 2000; since then, he has also been member of IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), responsible for the World Wide Web Conference series. Since autumn 2007 he is also member of SWSA (Semantic Web Science Association), the committee responsible for the International Semantic Web Conferences series.Ivan has also developed some software (in Python) that might be of interest. An example is an SPARQL (RDF Query Language) API implementation on the top the RDFLib package. This package has recently been added to the latest release of RDFLib with a proper SPARQL language parser. This work was done Chimezie Ogbuji. He also developed (and maintains) a RDFa Distiller software, ie, a Python implementation of the RDFa syntax, as well as a small package to interface SPARQL queries from Python.