Wernher Behrendt

Current

• Senior Researcher at Salzburg Research

Past

• Senior Research Associate at Cardiff University
• Research Associate at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

Education

• The University of Manchester
• Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

Connections

35 connections

Industry

Research

Wernher Behrendt’s Experience

• Senior Researcher

  Salzburg Research

  (Non-Profit; Research industry)

  February 2000 — Present (9 years 10 months)

  I am head of the Knowledge based Information Systems Group at Salzburg Research.
  
  I am also Coordinator of the European Integrating Project "Interactive Knowledge". The aim is to develop an open source, semantics-enabled technology stack for the content management systems of European SME CMS technology providers.
  
  Work on the Interactive Knowledge Stack (IKS) started in January 2009 and the project will run for 4 years. You can find information about IKS on www.iks-project.eu

• Senior Research Associate

  Cardiff University

  (Educational Institution; Higher Education industry)

  January 1995 — December 1998 (4 years )

  In Cardiff, I joined the database group of Alex Gray and Nick Fiddian which had been working for several years, on using a technique called "meta-translation" for creating interoperation services between heterogeneous databases. As I discovered during my PhD studies (never finished the thesis) the technique was actually closely related to attribute grammars and the idea was to specify the syntax and semantics of different database languages via a more expressive "hub language" and then generate automatic translators for the target languages from those specifications. I think the topic is still fairly "hot" in view of all the heterogeneous data stores on the WWW but I never managed to get the thesis finished. What I kept was my love for logic programming in Prolog. Google for "SWI Prolog" if you are interested - this might get a new lease of life because the semantic web is still poor on adequate implementation languages. There is still too much "http plumbing technology" out there, and not enough "smart connection principles" (except RDF as a good start), I suspect.

• Research Associate

  Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

  (Government Agency; Research industry)

  October 1989 — December 1994 (5 years 3 months)

  I worked in Keith Jeffrey's Department on an EU project called Multimedia Information Presentation System (MIPS, 1992 - 1994), a precursor idea to SMIL (http://www.w3.org/TR/SMIL/). Keith is now Director of ERCIM (see http://ercim-news.ercim.org/content/view/585/815/).
  
  Another project I worked on was about applying software engineering methodology to the building of expert systems in order to bring knowledge based technologies into the main stream of software engineering (1990 - 1992).
  And then, the WWW came ... and out went expert systems, HyTime, SGML, CORBA ... so I looked for a new challenge: Interoperation.

Wernher Behrendt’s Education

• The University of Manchester

  MSc , Cognitive Science , 1988 — 1989

• Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

  Mag. rer. nat. , English, Geography , 1978 — 1984

  Note that my interests gradually shifted my career from teaching to English linguistics (computer assisted language learning in the early 80s!), from there to cognitive science in the late 80s and early 90s and to AI, databases and Web-based computing in the late 90s up to now.

Additional Information

Wernher Behrendt’s Groups:

•    Framework Programme Seven (FP7)
•    FP7 Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Wernher Behrendt’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals