Gradmann, Stefan

Stefan Gradmann is a full Professor in the Arts department of KU Leuven (Belgium) as well as director of the University Library. Besides his continuing focus on knowledge management and semantically based operations his research and teaching  covers digital libraries and web based information architectures, with a special emphasis on the digital humanities and a focus on semiological aspects of meaning and interpretation in the information ecosystem of the WWW.

He studied Greek, philosophy and German literature in Paris and Freiburg (Brsg.) and received his Ph.D in Freiburg in 1986 in German Literature Studies. He has worked as scientific librarian in various managerial positions and later was Deputy Director of the University of Hamburg Regional Computing Center before occupying a chair of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / Berlin School of Library and Information Sciences with a focus on knowledge management and semantically based operations from 2008 to 2013. His working languages are German, English, French and Dutch.

Humanities Computing: Stefan was an international advisor for the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and as such has contributed to the report “Our Cultural Commonwealth”. Furthermore, he has been leading the EC funded project Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana (DM2E).

Europeana: He has been heavily involved in building Europeana, the European Digital Library, from its very beginnings More specifically he was leading work on technical and semantic interoperability and has been a co-author of the graph based Europeana Data Model (EDM) and triggered Europeana's involvement in the LoD community.

Presidence DGI: Since December 2008 Stefan Gradmann is president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Informationswissenschaft und Informationspraxis (DGI). With more than 1000 institutional and some 200 personal members DGI is a major player in the area of information science.