Alain Nadeau, 20 October 1957 – 25 July 2018 – a Swiss Linked Open Data pioneer

Alain Nadeau 2002

In spring 2012, on the advice of my then supervisor at the Bern University of Applied Sciences in Biel, I contacted the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) to let them know that I was planning to generate RDF and Linked Data from parts of their open data. Contrary to my assumption that I would receive no reply, a very enthusiastic response arrived the very next day from someone who had clearly engaged with Linked Data.

A few weeks later I was sitting at the first conference of the brand-new Opendata.ch association, waiting for the first talk. When two gentlemen behind me started talking about RDF, I turned around and read the name Alain Nadeau on the name badge – the author of the reply. Next to him sat his then supervisor Armin Grossenbacher, himself head of dissemination at the FSO. We got on extremely well and decided on the spot to start a Linked Data project together.

In the years that followed I had the privilege of working regularly with Alain and Armin. The two of them made it possible for me and my colleagues to gain our first real-world experience with Linked Data, and they championed our results just as enthusiastically as we did ourselves. Since 2013 we have been showing everything that can be done with statistical data when it is available as Linked Data. And in the process, the historicised register of municipalities became the mother of all Linked Data datasets in Switzerland.

Conversations with Alain always gave rise to dozens of new ideas; he was delighted by every step forward with Linked Data. For Alain, open data was a matter of honour, even when the publication took the form of CSV data – a data format he no longer thought much of; he found it too limited. His data world was the 5 stars promoted by Tim Berners-Lee, and reaching them was the great goal.

We had many joint plans for Linked Open Data. Sadly, Alain was slowed down in implementing them by a serious illness. Over the past years he fought, again and again. Those who, like me, only saw him every few months noticed little or nothing of his illness. He always kept his smile, and the sceptical to stern looks also remained whenever someone said something he did not agree with.

In the last few months I heard from Armin Grossenbacher how he was doing. He always told me where they had just been hiking together and that Alain was still planning this or that trip. Alain was no longer able to make his last trip to his beloved City of Light. Alain Nadeau died in Bern on 25 July 2018.

– written by Adrian Gschwend, Managing Director, Zazuko GmbH