Posts tagged with: job

My time at Talis Systems officially ended last week. I joined the team during painful times, but I'm glad (and proud) to have been a Talisian at least for one year. I have had a few freelance gigs with Talis before, but being part of the team was a whole different thing. And I could frequently travel to the UK, immprooff my inklish, and discover the nice city of Birmingham. There's a reason why they have that G in GB.

Work-wise, I probably learned more in the last 12 months than during the previous 5 years combined - hat tip to Julian, Leigh and all the other (Ex-)Talis folks. And much of that goes beyond just technical skills. I don't want to bore you, but you can definitely learn a lot about your path through life when you get the opportunity to look at it from a different perspective. Apparently, I first had to become an employee working in a foreign city to see the bigger picture around why I boarded that Semantic Web roller coaster in the first place and where it overlaps with my own ideas and interests.

So I am going back to self-employment. And I am also going to stay in the emerging Data Web market. But I'll approach some things differently this time.

First, change of attitude. To contribute in a personally more healthy way again. I won't argue about technical details and specifications any more. That just turns me into a grumpy person (belated apologies). I doubt that promoting products by advertising their underlying technologies is the best way for establishing and growing a market anyway. That's like trying to heat a room by just burning a lot of matches. Promising, with renewed anticipation after each match, but useless without some larger fire in the end. I would like to help spark off these larger fires. Without constantly burning my fingers (OK, enough fire imagery ;-).

The second change is related, and it is about focus. While I still see many people using the ARC2 toolkit, I have had more encouraging feedback and signs of demand recently around my work for end users (including app developers, in a sense). So my new mission is to improve "information interaction" on the Web, and I'll be offering services in that area.

And it looks like I'm off to a good start. I am already fully booked for the next months.

I received a number of very interesting job offers when I began searching for something new last month, but there was one company that stood out, and that is Talis. Not only do I know many people there already, I also find Talis' new strategic focus and products very promising. In addition, they know and use some of my tools already, and I've successfully worked on Talis projects with Leigh and Keith before. The job interview almost felt like coming home (and the new office is just great).

So I'm very happy to say that I'm going to become part of the Kasabi data marketplace team in September where I'll help create and drupalise data management and data market tools.

I will have to get up to speed with a lot of new things, and the legal and travel costs overhead for Talis is significant, so I hope I can turn this into a smart investment for them as quickly as possible. I'll even rename my blog if necessary... ;-) For those wondering about the future of my other projects, I'll write about them in a separate post soon.

Can't wait to start!

I have been happily working as a self-employed semantic web developer for the last seven years. With steady progress, I dare to say, but the market is still evolving a little bit too slowly for me (well, at least here in Germany) and I can't invest any longer. So I am looking for new challenges and an employer who would like to utilize my web technology experience (semantic or not). I have created a new personal online profile with detailed information about me, my skills, and my work.

My dream job would be in the social and/or data web area, I'm particularly interested in front-end development for data-centric or stream-oriented environments. I also love implementing technical specifications (probably some gene defect).

The potential show-stopper: I can't really relocate, for private reasons. I am happy to (tele)commute or travel, though. And I am looking for a full-time employment (or a full-time, longer-term contract). I am already applying for jobs, mainly here in D�sseldorf so far, but I thought I'd send out this post as well. You never know :)

Here is a nice project offer I received, but that I won't have enough time to work on myself. The project is about analyzing a set of statistical reports and creating an RDF Schema or OWL Ontology for them. With help from friendly #swig folks, a first selection of probably re-usable schemas could already be identified. The next task would be picking the right terms, and maybe some thoughts about additionally needed glue terms.

If you are interested, please send a short mail to fwd_1 at semsol dot com. It will be auto-forwarded to the offerer.

Update 2: Yay, I think I'm safe for the next couple of months, should have blogged much earlier. Now I'm starting to think we could really need a Job site for SemWeb people..

Update: Ah, the blogosphere. I already received some replies. One to share: Aduna is looking for a Java Engineer.
About a year ago, I received some funds which allowed me to re-write the ARC toolkit, and also to bring Trice (a semantic web application framework for PHP) to production-readiness. However, Semantic Web Development is generally still very new, especially in the Web Agency market where I'm coming from. It's not that easy yet to keep things self-sustaining.

May well be that I should blog less about bleeding-edge experiments, but rather about how RDF and SPARQL allow me to deploy extensible websites at a fraction of the time it used to take in the past. "Release Early", "Data First", "Evolve on the Fly", and all those patterns that SemWeb technology enables in a web development context.

Anyway, to keep things short: I'm actively (read: urgently ;-) looking for more paid projects. I'm a Web development all-rounder with particular interest in scripting languages and quite some experience in delivering RDF and frontend solutions (more details on my profile page). While it would of course be great to work on stuff where I can use my tools, I'm available for more general web development as well. I'm most productive when I can work from my office, but temporary travelling is basically fine, too. The D�sseldorf Airport is just minutes away.

Cheers in advance for suggestions,
Benji