Alexandre Monnin is Head of Web and Metadata Research at Centre Pompidou Research and Innovation Institute (IRI), PhD student in Philosophy at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, associate researcher at Inria Sophia Antipolis (WIMMICS team, ex-Edelweiss) and associate researcher at the the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts (CNAM, DICEN team)
Author of numerous papers and presentations, he is particularly interested in tagging (NiceTag project), ontologies and the social and Semantic Web. His doctoral work would like to flesh out the idea of a philosophy of the Web, in particular by showing the way philosophical concepts permeate the architecture of the Web. To that end, he is trying to elaborate a theory of the basic principles of the Web which could at the same time foster other approaches, in particular in the field of engineering. His goal is also to assess the social, economic and political consequences of Web technologies.
With this goal in mind, he organized the first Web and Philosophy interdisciplinary event in Sorbonne (PhiloWeb 2010), co-organized its sequel in Salonica with Harry Halpin, another workshop on “Philosophy and Engineering” during IC 2011, and currently coordinates, for IRI, Harry Halpin FP7 Marie Curie Fellowship (project “PHILOWEB”).
He is the responsible for the year 2011-2012 of two research seminar. The first is funded by the Ministry of Culture, organized by l’IRI with the support of Centre Pompidou, W3C and Wikimedia France, and addresses the relation between the Semantic and the social Web. The second one, co-directed with Harry Halpin, will take place in Sorbonne and Centre Pompidou. It is the first seminar in the world about the Philosophy of the Web (supported by the Collège des Ecoles Doctorales de Paris 1, FP7 “PHILOWEB” project and the journal Implications Philosophiques.
Alexandre Monnin coordinates, beyond “PHILOWEB”, the HDA-Bo and HDA-Lab projects, both funded by the Ministry of Culture in order to semantize, with Linked Data tools and technologies, free-tagging devices used on the Histoire des Arts website for the instruction of art in primary, secondary and high school (encompassing 350 cultural institutions as partners). He is also the co-initiator of the SemanticPedia project (fr.dbpedia.org, also with the Ministry of Culture, this time a associate researcher to INRIA). He collaborates with Wikimédia France on all these three projects.
