Dirk-Willem van Gulik, BBC

Dirk-Willem has over 20 years of Internet engineering, consulting and project delivery experience. He has worked for the European Commission's JRC, the United Nations, telecommunication firms and several satellite and space agencies. He participated in many international standards bodies, such as the IETF, on metadata, Identity GIS and Internet standards.

Dirk was a director and the president of the Apache Software Foundation during its first 10 years, and has worked on the Apache WebServer since the early days of the NCSA. Dirk built the original engineering team at Covalent Technologies as VP of Engineering and R&D. Dirk was one of the founders of Asemantics.com - a leader in Enterprise Information Integration; instrumental in making Semantic Web and Web/2.0 a reality. He then moved on to be CTO for Joost.com where he build a stellar engineering team from scratch and delivered the complete backoffice and audience facing Joost estate He is currently the Chief Technical Architect at the BBC, working with the Future Media and Technology group to deliver the new technology vision online.

Presentation: "Forging ahead - Scaling the BBC into Web/2.0"

Track: Architectures you Always Wondered About

Time: Thursday 13:00 - 14:00

Location: Fleming Room

Abstract: The BBC is one of the top 5 destinations in the UK, where most of the audience facing web estate is based on static HTML. A large change programme is underway to empower the creative community to use dynamic technologies, web/2.0 and social networking to talk to our audience. And do this at the massive scale required. This talk details how we are scaling up systems, coping with transactions speed far outside the realms of relational databases and allow our developers to use the latest and greatest technologies whilst protecting the reliability and quality that is core to the BBC.