I was born in 1961 in Tilburg and live and work in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
I graduated cum laude in Philosophy in 1988. In philosophy my main interest was Philosophy of Language. My thesis was on the reference of nouns (i.e. the relation between the word 'cat' and cats), and the theories of Frege, Wittgenstein and Kripke in particular. I have also developed a model for reference of my own.
I have been working in IT since 1988. I started as a programmer within Gak, a large Dutch social security company. I quickly became a relational database administrator and in-company database consultant. After a break travelling through India and Thailand (and meeting my wife-to-be ...) I developed several applications, again within Gak. Subsequently I worked on the in-company IT-methodology department. I always was (and still am) very interested in IT as a subject in itself, and the big question why so many IT projects fail.
After Gak I worked for Centraal Beheer, an insurance company. I became manager of the front-office of one of the daughter companies, responsible for several insurance products with an annual turnover of 75 million Euros, in charge of 26 people. After this I was project leader in the development of new insurance products. I realised however I wanted to work in IT, not insurance.
I started to work as an independent consultant in 1998. Since then I have developed applications, both alone and with subcontractors for healthcare and insurance. I also worked on several large-scale projects in B2B communication as a consultant. I dived into XML in 1999 and wrote several articles (mainly in Dutch) and gave presentations on XML and B2B communication. In 2000 my interest was extended to Topic Maps, and to my delight I noted a lot of similarities between the problems encountered there and those I studied in philosophy. Lately I have been working a lot on web services.
Email marc@marcdegraauw.com.