Jarno van Driel

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I am an international Structured Data and semantic SEO consultant. I started my career in 1998, during the early years of the web as a former print and web designer, Flash and 3D artist, front-end developer, and accessibility engineer. I continuously embraced new and challenging roles throughout my career to become a well-rounded digital professional.

My activities can be categorized and classified into many different taxonomies and ontologies. Yet labeling my job title is a near-impossible task because my activities overlap with a multitude of departments and specialists. An ambiguous state, because of which most simply know me as ‘just Jarno’, that structured data fanboy from Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

I became fascinated with the ‘semantic web’ when I discovered something called ‘semantic metadata’ (2008). Semantic annotations piqued my interest because of my background in web accessibility, which is about expressing structure and meaning. Things structured data markup takes to a whole other level, making it the obvious path ahead.

As an early adopter of Linked Open Data, my work was mentioned in several W3C discussion groups. Mentions for which I am very grateful because it would lead me to start publicly participating in schema.org (2013). Through this, I met and learned from many of the pioneers who are at the forefront of the semantic technologies being used today.