Herbert Van de Sompel

Who is Herbert Van de Sompel?

Herbert Van de Sompel is a Belgian librarian and computer scientist, most known for his role in the development of the Open Archives Initiative and standards such as OpenURL, Object Reuse and Exchange, and the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

Van de Sompel was born March 20, 1957 in Ghent, Belgium. His Ph.D dissertation in 2000 developed the idea of context-sensitive and dynamic linking of scholarly information resources. In this work, he developed the "concepts underlying the OpenURL framework for open reference linking in the web-based scholarly information environment." Van de Sompel's OpenURL framework allowed for the development of software known as link resolvers which take metadata about a source and attempt to find its full text. Link resolver web services have become widely used within academic libraries. His Ph.D dissertation and later development of the OpenURL standard led to the development and commercialization of the SFX link resolver and a series of products for libraries using this approach pioneered by Van de Sompel.