Peter F Brown - Information Architecture

Personal Biography

I was born in 1960 in London, England; brought up in Birmingham and finished my studies in London before being recruited upon graduation to the Council of Europe - in Strasbourg, France - as a tutor. At the end of a five-year contract, I moved in 1989 - to Brussels, Belgium - to start working in the European Parliament.

In 2004, I took some unpaid leave to work on a series of projects, driven largely by my main preoccupation with the theme of semantic interoperability (more of which later) and did some lecturing at the University of California in Berkeley and the XML Summer School at Oxford University in the UK. Following a brief spell back at the European Parliament, I worked for more than a year for the Austrian Federal Chencellery (on secondment from Brussels) in the field of eGovernment strategy, during Austria's Presidency of the European Council.

After starting one company in Vienna, I have now moved mack to Brussels and founded Pensive S.A., a software and services company.

I have four children from ages 22 to 13 years (Toni, Emmanuel, Alexander and Andreas) and am a single divorcee.

My family name from 1994 to 2003 was "Pappamikail", and some of my work found on the web will be under the name of Peter Pappamikail. Despite the different names, it is the same person: making the link between the two is an interesting challenge for the semantic web!

Although a Virgo, I am only a part-time perfectionist, preferring spontaneity and dialogue to the obsession of trying to be right all the time! My strong points are tenacity; sense of humour and sense of proportion; and admitting that I have weak points.

I am still a civil servant of the European Union (a so-called "permanent official") but despite what could be considered as the constraints of the public service, I have always tried to use my creativity to maximum effect, promoting investigations and studies into new developments and favouring innovative research, for example into semantic web technologies and policies at a time when other services are still coming to terms with the Web!This couldn't be more true than at present, where I am able to benefit from a very generous system allowing me to pursue a profession outside of my host institution while on unpaid, long-term leave. I trsust the arrangement will be mutually beneficial, with me gaining valuable business experience running my own company.

Professional development

I have been lucky in that my professional life to date has been immensely varied. Already as a student in the late 1970s, three interests emerged that have had a profound effect on my work:

• Politics: I was active in student politics, culminating in being elected as the National Secretary of the student organisation of the British Labour Party in the early 1980s. This was in the "dark days" of Labour's Europhobia during which the party reformed itself and became electable under the leadership of Neil Kinnock (retiring this year as a Vice-President of the European Commission). I have always considered myself a Federalist: not necessarily a popular label in the United Kingdom. But then many "Europhobes" are militantly pro-US and you can hardly get a more federalist model of government!
• Communications: whether running a local and regional student newspaper or being a publications officer for a national organisation like the Fabian Society, I took an early interest in the print media and later in multimedia. I was a beta-tester for the Apple Lisa computer and was involved in the UK Department of Education/BBC/Philips Domesday Project - the first major mass-participation, interactive, multimedia IT project in the world. The user's interface with information technologies thus became a major concern.
• Technology: I want computers to work for me. As Dan Connoly once put it very succinctly: "The bane of my existence is doing things that I know the computer could do for me". However, the danger is always that we accept technology's "way of doing things": as another sage put it, "the danger for humanity is not that computers start to think like people but rather that people start to think like computers". I have always been concerned that users keep a hand on the technology tiller.

The combination of these three areas of interest has enabled me to always keep an eye on the wider canvas, beyond the speciality of the day. I have always been extremely concerned about the relationship between business management and technologists, and have always argued for a very close collaboration between both, with each accepting and working with the strengths of the other.

See my Curriculum Vitae (or résumé) for more details of my career to date and my skills.