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 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.
- Burning Man – 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. Read my Blogposts about Burning Man.
- Art Salons – 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.
- Kaiserslautern – I lived in Kaiserslautern from 2004 to 2009.
- Jesus – I follow the teachings of Jesus. He helps me get the most out of my life and to love God, love myself, and love others with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strenght. I found that modern churches like the Vineyard Christian Fellowship Vienna are following Jesus on a good, pragmatic path.
- and more.