Despite all the hype about telecommuting and virtual offices, as well as one-person shops, what makes most people think your business is real is very simple: office space and full-time employees. Clark & Parsia—a self-described small Semantic Web R&D shop in DC—has lately been taking steps to be and to seem more like a real business. The best news this week is that we’ve hired our second full-time employee, Evren Sirin, who started on Tuesday.
Since I’ve been neglecting this weblog, I should first say a word about our first full-timer, Mike Grove, from UMD Mindlab, who started in the middle of June. Mike’s a Java hacker, has written more SemWeb end-user tools than anyone else I know, does C, JavaScript, and all sorts of fun stuff. Mike’s the kind of person who wrote his own XML parser—a long time ago—because he didn’t like the SAX API.
He’s been working with me on BIANCA—a project we’re doing for NASA—and on POPS (another NASA project), including JSpace, our reimplementation of m.c. schrafel’s mspace (which is the most underappreciated SemWeb tool, in my view) in Java, which we’re using, basically, as a visual query builder for RDF.
Evren Sirin—oh, sorry, that’s Dr Evren Sirin, one of UMD’s newest PhD’s—is one of the two or three best OWL programmers and researchers anywhere. No lie. We’re really lucky to have convinced him to come work with us and very excited about where we can take Pellet, OWL, and reasoning stuff generally. Evren’s going to be working on some of our client work—some of which I can’t yet talk about—and also on Pellet and OWL 1.1, etc.
Having Mike and Evren on board make Clark & Parsia a real company, and I’m humbled every day I get to work with these smart, fun, interesting people. (Okay, today Mike didn’t know that skiplists were a relatively new kind of data structure, and Evren didn’t know the difference between a copyright and license terms, but every other day these guys just crush me. And I couldn’t be happier!)
The second bit of news is that we’re looking for real office space, and we’ve found a great spot on Capitol Hill. It’s a bakery that we’re going to lease, renovate, and turn into a nice spot for geeks to do their thing. A 10 year lease is a bit scary; but with the DC real estate market the way it is, a 10 year lease is the next best thing to buying the building out right—hmm, maybe next year, when it will really be a buyer’s market?
Finally I should say that we’re looking to hire 3 to 5 new people by the middle of 2007, since we have a good deal of work and not enough people to do it, including:
- AJAX and web UI/HCI wizards
- top-notch Java hands who know algorithms and data structures cold
- good database theory and practice folks who aren’t afraid to write C and puts bits directly onto disk—someone who’d love to extend Postgres, for example
- people with strong AI, KR, logic programming backgrounds
If you’re interested in the sort of work we’re doing, have the technical chops, and like the idea of working for a small, but growing shop, drop me a line and we can talk.
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