Ivan Herman
EPUB Working Group Staff Contact at W3C
Aix-en-Provence, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIvan Herman is a seasoned standards and publishing technologist with over three decades of research and leadership experience at CWI and W3C, currently serving as Publishing@W3C Technical Lead and staff contact for EPUB, DID and Verifiable Credentials working groups. Trained as a mathematician with a PhD in computer science, he blends deep academic rigor with practical systems work spanning distributed programming, language design, and computer graphics. At W3C he has built bridges between the web and publishing industries, co-editing EPUB 3.3 and shaping accessibility and semantic interoperability (notably refining ARIA guidance for digital publishing). His open-source contributions include improving RDFLib’s microdata/RDFa parsing and curating DID vocabulary artifacts, reflecting a rare mix of specification authorship and hands-on implementation. An experienced conference organizer and standards committee member, he brings institutional memory and cross-domain perspective to technical governance. Based in Aix-en-Provence, he remains active in both formal standardization and pragmatic tooling to make rich, accessible web content interoperable.
16 years of coding experience
41 years of employment as a software developer
High School, High School at Fazekas GimnáziumDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science at Leiden UniversityMaster's degree, Applied Mathematics, Master's degree, Applied Mathematics at Eötvös Loránd TudományegyetemMathematics, Mathematics at Université Paris 6
English, German, Dutch, Hungarian, French
Github Skills (14)
accessibility10
rdf10
parserator10
json-ld10
parser10
python10
wai-aria10
documentation10
rdflib10
python-turtle9
turtle-graphics9
epub9
html9
n38
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
RDFLib/rdflib
Aug 2012 - Feb 2016
RDFLib is a Python library for working with RDF, a simple yet powerful language for representing information.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:55 commits, 3 PRs, 2 pushes in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Ivan primarily contributed to the `rdflib/rdflib` repository by implementing and improving microdata parsing capabilities. Their work included adding support for new parsers (RDFa 1.1, microdata, and a structured data parser), handling white space in literals, and fixing bugs related to fragment URIs. Further contributions involved updates to the microdata parser to incorporate the minimal vocabulary extension and handle the <meter> and <data> elements.
pythonpypisemantic-webrdf-xmlparser
w3c/did-extensions
Feb 2020 - Nov 2021
Decentralized Identifier Ecosystem Extensions
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:36 reviews, 39 commits, 13 PRs in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Ivan primarily contributed to documentation and vocabulary definition within the `w3c/did-extensions` repository. Their work involved updating and modifying various files related to the DID core vocabulary, including formal RDF representations, JSON-LD contexts, and Shape Expressions (ShEx). They also updated the vocabulary's HTML documentation, including a new JSON-LD context and various property definitions. The changes demonstrate a focus on aligning the vocabulary with the DID Core v1.0 data model and clarifying term usage.
did-wgdidspec
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.