I’m very pleased to announce that on Monday I’ll be starting a full-time position with TopQuadrant, a well-known name in the semantic web world. TopQuadrant makes TopBraid Suite, the W3C standards-based desktop tool for modeling data and for developing and deploying applications that take advantage of semantic web and linked data technology.

Of all the activities that their staff is engaged in—development, modeling, training, documentation, speaking, marketing, sales—I could be taking taking part in all of them, so while we haven’t thought of a job title yet, it will probably be one of those classically nebulous ones that tech company employees favor. (I have told them that if Dean Allemang is Chief Scientist, I’d love to have something with the word “Scientist” in it.)

Three things in particular attracted me to TopQuadrant: they have a great track record of applying semantic web technology to customer business goals, they make a fully functional version of one of their core products available for free, and they’re firmly committed to the support of open standards—there’s no patented secret sauce holding up their business model. Of course, these three points overlap a great deal; for example, as the term “semantic” gains in marketing buzzword status, more companies claim that their products use semantic technology, but they never mention RDF, OWL, or SPARQL, while TopQuadrant is actively engaged in helping customers to build applications that use these standards and that hide the syntax from the customers’ end users behind modern GUI interfaces when necessary.

I’m looking forward very much to learning, using, teaching, and building on these tools. (And if you’re interested in applying XML technologies to publishing systems, Innodata Isogen just might be interested in hiring you.)

8 Comments

By Michael Friedman on August 14, 2009 1:02 PM

Congratulations on the new position! It sounds like a great fit for you. Please do keep us informed!

By Betty Harvey on August 14, 2009 1:14 PM

Congratulations and good luck! I know you enjoy this new position and bring a lot of good work to the semantic web.

By John Cowan on August 14, 2009 2:26 PM

Suggestions:

“Other Scientist”

“Grunt Scientist”

“Indian Scientist” (as in “chiefs and Indians”)

“Grad” (from Larry Niven’s Smoke Ring books)

“Chief Natural Philosopher”

This all reminds me of how in the Anglican Church the Archbishop of York is the Primate of England, whereas the Archbishop of Canterbury is the Primate of All England. Of course, they are both primates, so that’s only reasonable.

By Taylor on August 14, 2009 5:56 PM

This is good for you and TQ…really pleased to hear this, now you’re going to have to dig into Jena a bit more, maybe some Jython bindings on the way?

By Brian Manley on August 14, 2009 9:27 PM

Congrats Bob! I interviewed with them a few weeks ago, and found them to be a really interesting and smart group. Hope it works out well for you!

By Michael Hausenblas on August 15, 2009 6:56 AM

Bob,

Congrats! Sounds very cool; hope you still find time to continue your great posts, here.

Cheers,
Michael

By Pat Hayes on August 16, 2009 12:10 AM

Congrats. On titles, I would go for “natural scientist”, which has a venerable history but also carries a subtle implication about all the other scientists :-)

By Peter Ring on August 16, 2009 6:55 PM

Congratulations! and keep up posting!

I’d love to have a business card that read ‘Evil Mad Scientist’ or just ‘Evil Genius’. For now, I have to settle with ‘Information Architect’. Maybe I should start wearing a white coat …