True but Irrelevant Rob Schrauwen on content, standards, and thirty years inside scientific publishing

About

Rob Schrauwen
Photo: Todd Fredericks

I joined Elsevier in 1991 as a desk editor. Before that, I received my PhD in Mathematics from Utrecht University. My thesis, Series of Singularities and Their Topology looked at series of singularities, mainly for complex curves, in terms of knots and links with multiplicities.

In 1995, I joined the program to move from print to electronic ("p-to-e"), called the CAP project: Computer-Aided Production. I was responsible for the systems and standards needed in Elsevier's editorial-production environment: tracking system, document warehouse and XML standards for journals and books. This culminated in the role of Chief Content Architect (a role that no longer exists). I am now VP, Data Strategy of the Research Data Platform, based in Amsterdam.

For most of those years I wrote a monthly editorial for an internal newsletter, addressed to my colleagues in what we called the CAM department and later the Research Data Platform. The editorials were my way of thinking out loud about strategy, about data models, about the principles that I believed should guide the work.

This site collects the ones that seem worth preserving – edited to remove internal jargon and to give enough context for a reader who wasn't in the room. The recurring theme in these posts is the title of this site: True but Irrelevant.

I also worked on the content standards themselves – the SGML DTDs of the 1990s, the XML DTDs that replaced them, the Tag by Tag documentation, the typeset model standardisation programme. That history is woven through many of these posts.

Of course I did not do those things on my own. While I develop this site, I also want to pay tribute to the trailblasers that went before me, my own team, and all the colleagues with whom I collaborated.

In a talk in Trivandrum, India I listed many lessons of the past 30 years, many of which go against established ideas about content modelling. This appears on YouTube.

I have never actively networked in the communities. As I am approaching my retirement, I realise that is much to be proud about.

Profile Links