A start-up is defined by its team. The success, drive and ambition required to make a startup successful comes from the team and its shared vision of making a really great product. I’ve been working hard recently to find additional talented people to join Team Kasabi.
Benjamin Nowack should be known to everyone who has been working in the semantic web space. He’s the creator of ARC2, the RDF PHP library which we’ve been using at Talis for many years; he’s won 3 separate semantic web challenges; and created a range of interesting semantic web application frameworks and data browsers. I’ve also personally admired his pragmatic approach to the technology and his goal to make it easy and accessible to use. Which is completely in step with our goals for Kasabi.
I’m very pleased to say that starting from next month Benji is joining Team Kasabi. Benji will be working on a number of aspects of the system, including the website, the Kasabi APIs and our developer tools. I’m really excited to be working with Benji. He’ll be bringing his deep experience as a developer to bear on helping us make Kasabi a great place for people to work with data.
We’re still recruiting though. Currently I’m looking to recruit a Data Engineer and a Commercial Lead. So if you want to come and work with large datasets, or help us develop the commercial aspects of the web of data, then get in touch!
Benjamin Nowack
08/18/2011
Thank you very much for the nice welcome! Exciting.
Stéphane Corlosquet
08/18/2011
That’s fantastic news! Congrats Bengee.
Will ARC2 be on the list of things Bengee will work on at Kasabi?
Benjamin Nowack
08/19/2011
Stéphane, thanks
I think the short-term focus is on more urgent things, but *if* I’m going to work on RDF middleware stuff, then it would rather be an entirely new library (or an equivalent native Drupal module perhaps…?). Something more modern and lightweight which can be hooked in more easily. We’ll see.
Stéphane Corlosquet
08/19/2011
ARC2′s been working well so far for us in Drupal, too bad it’s not maintained any more. Whether it’s a new lib or an improved ARC2 on PHP 5.3, it’ll be cool. I think what we’ve been missing the most in the Drupal project is an in-memory SPARQL engine and a db vendor agnostic support. I would not build a Drupal specific library, so that other PHP projects can also benefit from said RDF library. Drupal can integrate pretty well with external libs, and we’ve managed to make ARC2 integration and download pretty seamless.