Herbert Van de Sompel is a

Belgian Belgian may refer to: * Something of, or related to, Belgium * Belgians, people from Belgium or of Belgian descent * Languages of Belgium, languages spoken in Belgium, such as Dutch, French, and German *Ancient Belgian language, an extinct languag ...

librarian A librarian is a person who works professionally in a library providing access to information, and sometimes social or technical programming, or instruction on information literacy to users. The role of the librarian has changed much over time, ...

, computer scientist, and musician, most known for his role in the development of the

Open Archives Initiative The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives t ...

(OAI) and standards such as

OpenURL An OpenURL is similar to a web address, but instead of referring to a physical website, it refers to an article, book, patent, or other resource within a website. OpenURLs are similar to permalinks because they are permanently connected to a re ...

Object Reuse and Exchange The Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of web resources. The OAI-ORE specification implements the ORE Model which introduces the resource map (ReM) that mak ...

, and the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

Career

Van de Sompel was born March 20, 1957 in

Ghent Ghent ( nl, Gent ; french: Gand ; traditional English: Gaunt) is a city and a municipality in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is the capital and largest city of the East Flanders province, and the third largest in the country, exceeded in ...

Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...

. His PhD dissertation in 2000 developed the idea of context-sensitive and dynamic linking of scholarly information resources. In this work, he developed the "concepts underlying the OpenURL framework for open reference linking in the web-based scholarly information environment." Van de Sompel's

framework allowed for the development of software known as link resolvers which take metadata about a source and attempt to find its full text. Link resolver web services have become widely used within academic libraries. His Ph.D dissertation and later development of the

standard led to the development and commercialization of the SFX link resolver and a series of products for libraries using this approach pioneered by Van de Sompel. In 2006 Van de Sompel was named the first recipient of the SPARC Innovator Award by the

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is an international alliance of academic and research libraries developed by the Association of Research Libraries in 1998 which promotes open access to scholarship. The coalition ...

(SPARC) for starting the

(OAI) and the open reference linking framework (

). In 2017, Van de Sompel received the Paul Evan Peters Award from the

Coalition for Networked Information The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization whose mission is to promote networked information technology as a way to further the advancement of intellectual collaboration and productivity. Overview The Coalition for Network ...

(CNI). From 2002 to the end of 2018, Van de Sompel held positions at the

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

Research Library, including as the Lead of the Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team. Notable work includes the

Memento Project Memento is a United States ''National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP)''–funded project aimed at making Web-archived content more readily discoverable and accessible to the public. Technical description ...

, which aims to make accessing archived web content as easy as visiting current web pages. From 2019 to early 2021, he served as chief innovation officer of Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) in The Netherlands. Following his wife after her appointment to a position in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

, he resigned at DANS while keeping professional connections to both DANS and Ghent University. Though best known for his work as a computer scientist, Van de Sompel also made music in his earlier life, including two albums, "Unploughed" and "Not a Festschrift- Geschnitzte Figuren," with his group, Young Farmers Claim Future.

References

External links

* *
Herbert van de Sompel: ''Dynamic and context-sensitive linking of scholarly information''. Dissertation Universiteit Gent, 2000.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Van De Sompel, Herbert Internet architecture Living people Belgian librarians 1957 births Los Alamos National Laboratory personnel