I'm very pleased to announce that on Monday I'll be starting a full-time position with TopQuadrant, a well-known name in the semantic web world. TopQuadrant makes TopBraid Suite, the W3C standards-based desktop tool for modeling data and for developing and deploying applications that take advantage of semantic web and linked data technology.

Of all the activities that their staff is engaged in—development, modeling, training, documentation, speaking, marketing, sales—I could be taking taking part in all of them, so while we haven't thought of a job title yet, it will probably be one of those classically nebulous ones that tech company employees favor. (I have told them that if Dean Allemang is Chief Scientist, I'd love to have something with the word "Scientist" in it.)

Three things in particular attracted me to TopQuadrant: they have a great track record of applying semantic web technology to customer business goals, they make a fully functional version of one of their core products available for free, and they're firmly committed to the support of open standards—there's no patented secret sauce holding up their business model. Of course, these three points overlap a great deal; for example, as the term "semantic" gains in marketing buzzword status, more companies claim that their products use semantic technology, but they never mention RDF, OWL, or SPARQL, while TopQuadrant is actively engaged in helping customers to build applications that use these standards and that hide the syntax from the customers' end users behind modern GUI interfaces when necessary.

I'm looking forward very much to learning, using, teaching, and building on these tools. (And if you're interested in applying XML technologies to publishing systems, Innodata Isogen just might be interested in hiring you.)