User:Tom Baker

Tom Baker is CIO of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), chairs the W3C incubator group for Library Linked Data, and recently chaired the W3C working group Semantic Web Deployment. Tom holds an MLS from Rutgers University and an MA and PhD in Anthropology from Stanford. He has worked as a researcher at an economic institute in Italy; taught at the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand; led projects at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD, later Fraunhofer) and the Goettingen State Library; and consulted with organizations such as the Max Planck Digital Library and the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Seeing metadata as language, Tom was instrumental in standardizing the Dublin Core and Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) as Semantic Web vocabularies. He advocates a healthy ecosystem of vocabularies ranging from individual initiatives to formal standards and preserved by memory institutions, their persistent URIs serving as "footnotes" for data of long-term significance.