Richard established Data Liberate having been with the UK’s leading Linked Data and Semantic Web technology company, Talis, for over twenty years. This coupled with his passion for and engagement with new and emerging technology trends, gives him a unique perspective of the issues challenging information professionals today.
He worked for three years with the global library cooperative OCLC as Technology Evangelist, promoting and demystifying the benefits of Linked Data inside and outside of the organisation, to the broader library, Web and Semantic Web communities.
Now as independent entity he is able to share this experience for the benefit of many organisations, and communities.
A speaker with a global reputation for insightful, thought provoking yet understandable, and entertaining keynote sessions at major Data, Web, Semantic Web, SEO, and library focused conferences and events. Through these scene setting presentations, workshops, and facilitated panels, Richard influences the thinking and debate around these general technologies and their applicability to individual sectors and organisations.
As Chair of the W3C Schema Bib Extend working group, and an active member of the Schema.org W3C Community Group, he is at the heart of the development of the Schema.org data vocabulary that is driving the massive growth in structured data sharing on the web that underpins significant advances by Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex) such as Semantic Search, and Knowledge Graphs.
Through his interaction with individual organisations he brings this broad understanding of data on the wider web to help set strategic direction; spread awareness of potential benefits across the organisation; consultation on applicability for individual products; and working with individual teams on training, development, delivery, and market messages.
As part of his decade-long involvement with the evolution of broad Semantic Web and Linked Data techniques and technologies in all areas, Richard has had a particular focus on the library community and their evolution from traditional record based internal data practices and processes towards a more open Linked Data and entity description based approach. This focus, working with National, Research & other libraries of all types, system suppliers, publishers and data providers is helping to make libraries and their resources visible and discoverable on the web. This experience translates well into both areas of cultural heritage and to organisations of all types who are concerned about their visibility in context on the web.
Follow Richard on the Data Liberate Blog, as @rjw on Twitter, in LinkedIn, catch up with his presentations on SlideShare, or contact for a conversation.