Ada Lovelace Day salutes… Libby Miller
Last yet, for Ada Lovelace Day, I wrote about Hedy Lamarr, the glamorous Hollywood actress who had a sideline in fiddling with radios - not just fiddling, actually helping invent and patent frequency hopping. This year, I decided it would be better to celebrate the achievements of a contemporary female technologist. I initially thought of applauding the great work being done by Jeni Tennison - the XSLT expert who is now working on implementing the Linked Data component of the ambitious plans for data.gov.uk - only to find that Sheila has already done so.
This year, I am saluting the work of Libby Miller (twitter: @libbymiller). Libby is the co-author, along with Dan Brickley, of the FOAF vocabulary, which described and plotted out the basic premises of social networking long before sites like MySpace and Facebook capitalised on them, and long before we started inventing goofy terms like “social graph”. FOAF is still used as a foundational vocabulary on the Semantic Web today. Libby has worked at the Institute for Learning Research and Technology at the University of Bristol, and has also worked at the video startup Joost - which was pioneering technologically in the use of HTML, CSS, RDF and JavaScript to build an immersive video experience. Libby now represents the BBC as part of the NoTube Project which is trying to improve the experience of watching TV by making schedules contextually-aware using Semantic Web technology.
So, thank you Libby. Thank you for giving us FOAF, thank you for innovating, thank you for being friendly and pragmatic and helpful. Thank you for being awesome. Keep it up.
This post is part of Ada Lovelace Day 2010.
