Alexandre PassantI am Alexandre Passant, a Ph.D. student at LaLIC, Université Paris-Sorbonne. I hold a DESS “Technologies de l’Internet pour les Organisations” (eq. M.Sc.) and a DEA “Systèmes Intelligents” (eq. M.Sc.) both from Université Paris Dauphine. I’m currently also affiliated with EDF R&D where I apply most of my work in a corporate environment, which lets me confront my research to real-life scenarios. During my studies, I also worked as a part time software engineer at Nortel Networks R&D and then Makina Corpus.

My research mainly focuses on relationships between the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. I’m involved in the SIOC project, a standard way to model social media websites meta-data on the Semantic Web, as a co-author of the specification and editor of related documents, accepted as a W3C submission in 2007. I’m also co-founder of the MOAT project, which goal is to provide machine-readable representation of tags, tagging, and their related meaning, in order to solve some of the limits of free-tagging and let tagged content enters the Linked Data Web. Finally, I’m also interested in related aspects of this convergence as lightweight ontologies (like FOAF), interlinking corporate Web 2.0 data thanks to Semantic Web technologies, ontology population using Semantic Wikis, and semantic search engines based on the previous principles.

I am also a proponent of practical and pragmatic views about Semantic Web technologies and I maintain a weblog on this website about various experiments and services related to these fields. I also wrote some more advanced services, such as FOAFMap or doap:store. When available, source code of these projects is licenced using Free Software or Creative Commons licence, since I strongly believe in openess of code, speach, and actually anything that could help to build a better Web - and world.

I hope to complete my Ph.D. before the end of the summer, so will look for a PostDoc or Research / R&D position from fall 2008. My wishes would be to keep working on the topics mentioned before, with real-life and concrete problems that could provide useful and novel services to end-users. My goal is to still expand my knowledge about these fields, and ideally include new topics as rules and inference on large-scale environments.

Untechnically speaking, I was born on the 15th of June 1980, I’m married and based in Alfortville, near Paris, France. I enjoy listening to an playing music (ska, punk-rock, rock’n'roll …), tattoos, geek culture, traveling, and taking pictures. If you want to contact me, just drop me a mail at alex@passant.org. You can also follow me on various online accounts:

NB: This webpage embeds RDF using RDFa data and is designed to be my FOAF profile. You can extract data thanks to an RDFa distiller, as done here. My main URI is http://apassant.net/alex.