Steffen Lindek

Short Biography:

Steffen studied physics at the RWTH Aachen, the EPF Lausanne and the University of Heidelberg. He did his diploma and PhD theses in the Light Microscopy Group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, where he developed novel high-resolution light-microscopy techniques, for which several patents were granted. From 1996 to 1999, he was a post-doctoral fellow with the BioImage project at EMBL and worked on the design and the implementation of the BioImage database for microscopy images.   Since 2000, Steffen has been working as a freelance database and metadata consultant for various academic and commercial clients, mostly in the UK and in Germany. During this time, he acquired extensive experience as a project manager for international scientific research initiatives.   Steffen's recent work has mostly been on the development of ontologies for media projects. With Rightscom he worked as a consultant for the International DOI Foundation and for several of its members. In particular, he was involved in projects based on the <indecs> framework and on Ontologyx, Rightscom's proprietary ontology based on an innovative contextual semantic structure, e.g. the MPEG-21 RDD project and the Rights Data Integration (RDI) project, which has demonstrated how rights data can be made interoperable across the full media spectrum, and XML messaging standards such as the music industry's DDEX and ONIX.   In 2019, he has also been working as a communication leader for LSFM4LIFE, a diabetes research project funded by the EU's H2020 Research & Innovation Programme.

Projects and Areas of Interest:

Life Sciences The Physical Biology Group at the Buchmann Institute for Molecular Life Sciences, which focuses on the advanced light-microscopy techniques for the life sciences. Media The International DOI Foundation - the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a system for identifying intellectual property in the digital world. The MPEG-21 Rights Data Dictionary based on the <indecs> framework. DDEX, an organization developing metadata communication standards for the digital media industry. EDItEUR, the international group coordinating the development of standards for electronic commerce in the book, e-book and serials sectors. Francis Cave Digital Publishing, an XML consultancy. The Vocabulary Mapping Framework (VMF), an interoperability platform for the mapping of controlled vocabularies from content metadata standards and proprietary schemes. The Linked Content Coalition, which started the Rights Data Integration (RDI) project. The Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR), the organization developing the identifier for movie and television assets.

Publications and Patents (PDF file)

Last modified: November 2020.