Jarno van Driel

Jarno van Driel is an international structured data and semantic SEO consultant. He started his career in 1998, during the early years of the web as a print and web designer, Flash and 3D artist, front-end developer, and accessibility engineer. Jarno has continuously embraced new and challenging roles throughout his career to become a well-rounded digital professional.

Jarno’s activities can be categorized and classified into many different taxonomies and ontologies. Yet labeling Jarno’s job title is a near-impossible task because his activities overlap with a multitude of departments and specialists. An ambiguous state, because of which most simply know him as ‘just Jarno’, that structured-data fanboy from Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Jarno became fascinated with the ‘semantic web’ when he discovered something called ‘semantic metadata’ (2008). Semantic annotations piqued Jarno’s interest because of his background in web accessibility, which is about expressing structure and meaning. Things structured data markup takes to a whole other level, making it the obvious path ahead.

As an early adopter of linked open data, his work was mentioned in several W3C discussion groups. Mentions for which Jarno is very grateful because it would lead him to start publicly participating in schema.org (2013). Through this, Jarno met and learned from many of the pioneers who are at the forefront of the semantic technologies being used today.