I work at the portatour® route-planning software in a marketing / sales position since 2013. I am very happy there. You find my professional career steps in my LinkedIn profile. I am married with Ingrid Brunner-Sauermann since 2004.
I love the following things in my life:
- SEO, Growth Hacking – in my current position, I work daily to grow the business of the portatour® route-planning software.
- Semantic Desktop – from 2003 to 2012 I was working fulltime to realize the vision of a Semantic Desktop. The Semantic Desktop is a vision to enhance computer operating systems with means to store metadata in a standardized way – based on the W3C Semantic Web standards. This enables applications to share concepts and reflects the way people thing – connected. The Semantic Desktop is thus an enlarged supplement to the user’s memory. I published multiple scientific works about the Semantic Desktop and initiated multiple research projects. The biggest project is was part of was the NEPOMUK Semantic Desktop FP6 EU integrated project. The peak result was a rollout to about 4.7 million people as part of KDE and Nokia’s Maemo platform. Various reasons lead to a decline after 2010: Mandriva and Nokia going out of business, a complex and hard to maintain approach, a lack of developers and maintainers, me focusing on a startup. I continued my gnowsis project with the Refinder startup until 2013, which went out of business December 2013 (read the story here). A lot of my publications document this vision. Read my gnowsis posts here.
- Web Standards – In 2003, I started the In the years 2007 and 2008, while at DFKI, I was member of the Semantic Web Education and Outreach group (SWEO) of the W3C. As part of my work, I co-edited Cool URIs for the Semantic Web, which has been published December 2008. I was part of the founding team of the oscaf foundation (semantic desktop repository of OSCAF on sourceforge). Read my Semantic Web posts here.
- Environmental activism – in 2019 I joined Friday For Future Austria, a group lobbying for climate justice and climate protection in Austria. Since February 2021 I am part of the web team maintaining fridaysforfuture.at.
- Participatory Art – Since 2001 I am a satellite of Monochrom.at. In this role, I helped co-create events and concepts. I am co-inventor of monochrom’s massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling which made it to TED.com. I am part of the global Burning Man community since 2006. We co-create participatory events. People come together to share artworks, workshops, food, drinks without monetary exchange, which creates a family atmosphere. I volunteer as Regional Contact in Austria for the Burning Man organization. I created and performed the augmented-reality out-of-body-experience theater play “GodSees ” at Burning Man 2010 and subsequent events. I co-created and co-organized regional events in Austria: Erntefestival 2011-2013 (where I performed Facebuttons) and Spark 2015-2016. In 2013, I founded Salon Leobard, a participatory creative Salon that comes together Saturdays every few weeks in Vienna. Together we contribute a camp with large-scale artwork at regional burns in Europe. We built and burned the pirate ship Miss Inspiration. We created the Hammock Reactor and run it since 2017. Read my personal blogposts about Burning Man and the Salon Leobard Weblog.
- Burners.at – I am founding member of the Austrian Burning Man community association and co-webmaster of www.burners.at.
- Kaiserslautern – I lived in Kaiserslautern from 2004 to 2009.
- Spirituality – I appreciate spiritual traditions and live by a deep respect for life, which I expressed in Mein Mantra – Für das Leben.
- and more.
I am represented on the web
This blog is part of the open fediverse, too
The web was made for both humans and computers to follow each other, so I use open standards to be part of the social web. Hello Friends, FOAF, RSS, Mastodon, Fediverse 🌮 all in one
