Michael Hausenblas (mhausenblas on irc, has blog) works at Joanneum Research in the field of media semantics. But as you can see at a glance his homepage, his interest in, and contributions to the Semantic Web/Web of Data cover a considerably broader scope – especially around linked data (he’s one of the team behind riese, serving statistical data about 500 million Europeans).

Michael’s also an organizer of the upcoming Web of Data Practitioners Days meet-up (Vienna, Austria – Oct 22-23). As one of the aims of the event is to introduce newcomers – webmasters, developers, business folks – to the ideas and applications of the Web of Data, I quizzed Michael mostly from the newcomer point of view.

PS. The podcast audio link itself (as marked up by WordPress) appears to get filtered out by certain aggregators – it’s here: MichaelHausenblas.mp3. Incidentally I also I got a request for a transcript – on listening back I can understand why one might assume such a thing would pre-exist, but there wasn’t actually any preparation (although Michael and I aren’t exactly strangers). I was on sleep-deprived autopilot, firing whatever tricky questions came to mind at Michael, and he volleyed them with remarkable ease.