Joshua Tauberer

= open government advocate

URL = http://razor.occams.info/

Bio

"I am a fifth-year graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in the linguistics Ph.D. program. My primary academic interest is phonetics, in particular segment duration as a cue to voicing (and the acquisition of these cues), and computational models of OT grammar acquisition, but I'm also interested in formal syntax and semantics.

My main hobby is about using government data to improve transparency and civic education. In my spare time I run GovTrack.us, an open-source website that tracks what's happening in the U.S. Congress, and am trying to build a community around open government open source hacking ("o gosh!"). But I also work on this from a policy angle and am having a good deal of success. You can see some of what I do at The Open House Project, where I blog occasionally. More on this if you scroll down.

Those two interests have lead me to an interest in the Semantic Web, which I think will eventually dramatically change the way we interact with information. I maintain a few Semantic Web resources at rdfabout.com and have put out over a billion linked-data RDF triples (that's a lot) about U.S. politics and statistics.

I spend a lot of my time on computer software, as you can see. My "third" life is as a component of the structural engineering software company LARSA, which I've been with for eight years now. My current project there is "composite section construction". Some of my other software projects are listed below.

Lastly, I am a locavore: I try to purchase locally grown and responsibly raised food when I can. Being a locavore, to me, stands for treating food as food, not as raw materials to be spliced and recombined (think high-fructose corn syrup) and then marketed in cunning ways." (http://razor.occams.info/)