About Giovanni Tummarello
Greetings, my name is Giovanni Tummarello, Ph.D. I live near Ancona, Italy and work at Universita' Politecnica delle Marche, between Galway (Ireland) and Trento (Italy). I do so since i share a position at as a Research Unit leader at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (National University of Ireland, Galway). DERI and at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) in Trento.
The thing I am mostly focused on is to give my contribution to making the "Semantic Web" an achievement for mankind - something that we will at some point give for granted and will benefit all. The target has so far proven elusive but planets might be aligning in the next few years.
I lead the efforts of Sindice - currently the most comprehensive Search Engine for the Web of Data, and fathered other projecs among which Semantic Web Pipes - live fusion and processing of Semantic Web data, the award winning DBin Semantic Web client and most recently of Sig.ma a browser and automatic mashup generator for the web of data.
I also worked and remain very interested in Multimedia Metadata. I the past years I created several tools for MPEG7 and participated in the the Multimedia Semantics W3C incubator group.
Also i am the CEO of Sensible Logic a Semantic Web consulting company.
I have been farely succesfull at funding acquisition and building a very strong team (mostly the guys behind Sindice).
Clearly, I am no HTML wiz.
But why "Semantic Web"?
So, it goes by itself that I very involved in Semantic Web research, but why?
I don't do SW becouse, say, at some point somebody proposed it to me. I specifically choose this topic since I believe it is one of the fields which could possibly bring the greatest benefits in the shortest time to a large amoung of the population.
A lot of SW research is often about recycling old ideas or very specific applications with no intention of anyhow provoking a "net effect". The dream is however very different; people would greatly benefit right now from having something *that works* and allows their knowledge to be connected in a way fundamentally better than textual query on Google.
Here is currently my best (visible) shot at it. The information below comes from 50+ sources on the Web of Data (most of them normal web pages) as found and automatically aggregated by Sig.Ma. See it here fully expanded and interactive.
So basically I strive to work on what i consider to be the core and the most difficult challenge in the Semantic Web/Web of Data initiative: the alchemy of teoretical, technical, economical (in strict and broad sense), social aspects so that it becomes possible, useful, viable, "cool", to use and partecipate to the vision of distributed, highly automated reuse of information across the Web.
and then?
Once we mange to get the SW started ( :-)! ) i'll probably move to something else, most probably fundamental research in AI or Computational Intelligence (subsymbolic systems).
I have been gifted with skills to do immaginative innovation and research so I wish to do as much as possible while i can.
A few resources:
Curriculum Vitae (updated August 2010)
Pictures (old)
A foaf file (my personal tribute to practically demostrating the inutility of statically posting foaf files).
Family achievements:
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Eleonora!
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As a hobby I study as baritone, results may vary.
Nostalgic but happy flashBack about stuff i like to remember :-)
Going back a bit (if you're here reading then i am entitled to talk a bit i guess), i have been rather early at computer stuff and potentially interesting ( /me thinks ) projects. Back in 6th grade i had my Amiga and managed to get the first version of the first italian book published on Motorola 68000 ASM. Great day that was. by the end of the 8th grade i had my first commercial software published and distributed (old "Amiga Action Reply Utilities").
I later met a great hacker and musician (Roberto Molinelli) and together we created stuff like "Pango", a commercial Amiga game published in 1990, then ported to PC and to coin op machines, then "Vocom" a full featured kit to develop and run Interactive Voice Systems. (back in 1994)
When i was finally given a 32 bit compiler and a nice graphic environment (Delphi 2!) i rushed to create something i really felt the need to play with, Really. Written quite some time ago (1995? just check my pic on that page :-)) i still receive a lot of really really nice email about it. Some people have ported it, etc.. will create a page about it possibly one day. Following screenshots finally shed light on the fate of blue squares and black balls under variale gravity conditions..
Another evergreen of mine "Fractal Fighters", made in a few days over christmas 96. Shoot a friend or a bot over old fashioned fractal profiles :-)
I then did more games (see MissileCommand1998!, plus others in the "Tommy and Oscar" series from rbw.it).. Utilities, check out this surpisingly polished (and never released) "Shutdown Master", then Web programming, created the document/ecommerce system that handles the activity of the Comitato Termotecnico Italiano, worked on a very cool alternative Shell for windows, opened a clever web community (some sort of Slashdot.it),
flashback ends :-)
To contact me:
g.tummarello@toomuchspam_removeme_gmail.com
giovanni.tummarello@toomuchspam_removeme_deri.org
Ireland (most likely):
+353 87 1272938 (mobile, yes it's ok)
+353 091 495285 (office)
Italy:
+39 331 1725165
Skype: mynickisjccq
my Foaf file: http://g1o.net/foaf.rdf and its not updated graphical reppresentation
my URI: http://g1o.net/foaf.rdf#me
my Calendar
Updated August, 2010
