Roland Schwänzl

Roland Schwänzl (born February 20, 1952 in Trier ; † July 29, 2004 in Osnabrück ) was a German mathematician and taught at the University of Osnabrück .

Schwänzl studied mathematics and physics at the University of Saarbrücken and did his doctorate with Tammo tom Dieck at the University of Göttingen with a thesis on algebraic topology. From 1976 he was at the University of Osnabrück.

After building up a Unix- based local area network in the mathematics department in Osnabrück in the early 1990s , he became one of the founders of the Math-Net initiative of the International Mathematical Union and chairman of its 'Technical Advisory Board'.

Schwänzl recognized the importance of metadata for indexing the content of Internet documents early on. His working group presented the search service MPRESS (Mathematics-Preprint-Search-Service) at a workshop of the “Dublin Core Metadata Initiative” . It turned out that this service was the first implementation of the 'Dublin Core Metadata' set, which was then in development. Roland Schwänzl was quickly appointed to the board of the Dublin Core Initiative. The chairman of the initiative, Stuart Weibel, writes about his work: “Roland fought resolutely for his ideas and invested substantial, intellectual work to promote the initiative. He took his leadership role in this area of ​​standardization very seriously. [...] We always tried to keep him happy. Knowing well, if Roland, with his mathematical accuracy, thought there was a problem or there was an error, then this was most likely the case. "

Schwänzl represented numerous funding programs for information and communication and represented Germany abroad. He was the elected spokesman for the IuK Initiative with the political line to keep the access to knowledge open and to realize it technically worldwide. The initiative for electronic information and communication (short: IuK ) was brought into being by the scientific societies DGfE, DGPs, DGS, DMV and GDCh. Schwänzl was a member and head of the Executive Board there and initiated the Metadata and Classification working group . In addition, he initiated and designed extensive nationwide projects - such as CARMEN, interdisciplinary information systems -, implemented them and carried them out. He was one of the founders of the Institute for Scientific Information e. V. and the Information Engineering course at the University of Osnabrück . Abroad, he represented Germany as a technical expert in international coding and standardization committees.

The husband and father of two daughters died after a short, serious illness at the age of 52.

Web links

• Judith Plümer zu Schwänzl