MENZO WINDHOUWER

WELCOME, on this page you can find information on the research and development I, Menzo Windhouwer, did in the last few years at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI ), the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and The Language Archive (TLA) (a unit of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Psycholinguistics with support by both the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW; Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities) and the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (KNAW; Royal Dutch Academy of Science). I worked at the TLA on behalf of DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services; a KNAW and NWO institute). Lateron I worked at the Meertens Instituut (also a KNAW institute) where I continue to work on TLA and the European CLARIN infrastructure. After a merge of the technical departments of serveral KNAW Institutes into the new Humanities Cluster Digital Infrastructure department I am now Lead Software Engineer of the Product Team Structured Data.

FLAT is a CLARIN compatible repository solution I'm developing for TLA and is deployed at both the Meertens Institute and the MPI. A core component of the CLARIN infrastructure is the Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI), which I help maintaining. This includes its specification, various parts of the infrastructure and exploitation tools.

AT THE TLA I was Head Knowledge Software. The TLA knowlegde software included, among others, our solution for semantic interoperability on which I focused mainly. The corner stone of this solution was formed by ISOcat, which was an implementation of a Data Category Registry (DCR) as described by the ISO 12620:2009 standard developed in ISO/TC37/SC3/WG1. Two companion registries, i.e., RELcat and SCHEMAcat, were also under development.

THE TYPOLOGICAL DATABASE SYSTEM (TDS) I developed earlier at the UvA is aimed at providing a common linguistic, i.e. typologist, expert interface to several heterogenuous and international databases. The technology deployed ranges from traditional relations database systems to cutting edge semantic web technology, bridged by XML related technolgies.

BEFORE  I started working at the TDS project I finished my PhD thesis at CWI. The title of my thesis was "Feature Grammar Systems - Incremental Maintenance of Indexes to Digital Media Warehouses". It describes the mathematical theory of Feature Grammar Systems and their implementation implications. Feature grammar systems are used to describe and steer the automatic extraction of annotations or meta-data from multimedia objects.  The described system was prototyped in the CWI internal Acoi project, which has been deployed in several related national projects: Waterland, DMW and MIA.

A LIST of my publications can be found here.

View my CLARIN ERIC homepage

View Menzo Windhouwer's profile on LinkedIn