István Szakadát

István Szakadát graduated as a mathematical engineer in 1982 (BME) and as a sociologist in 1985 (ELTE). Since 1987 he has been working for the Department of Sociology at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME). Between 2017 and 2022, he was Head of the Department of Sociology and Communication. He has published several political geography books on the Hungarian parliamentary elections ('Political Atlas of Hungary'), a book on new media ('All in One') in 2007, and books on action theory in 2008 ('Action Theory in a Nutshell') and in 2014 ('syi.hu/cse'). His main research interests are in the interpretation of regularities in human actions and their description in formal terms. Since 2002, he has been involved in several R&D projects related to digital technology, such as Web of Words (development of a deep web search engine based on semantic-like standards) and Data Riddle (building a web traffic analysis program for the largest Hungarian portal). In 2005-2006 he was the leader of a large national R&D consortium MEO. The main objectives of the MEO project were to build a top-level ontology and to develop an ontology infrastructure. In addition to technology-related R&D projects on new digital media, he has also won research grants in the social sciences, in the fields of political geography and action theory. Besides his academic career, he has been actively involved in building Hungarian digital culture from the very beginning. In 1993, together with a colleague, he published the first Hungarian multimedia CD-ROM called Politics. Following its success, he was editor and developer of the ABCD Interactive CD-ROM Magazine, published with the support of the multinational company IDG between 1994 and 1997. Between 1995 and 2011, he was a key player in the project launched by the Hungarian Film Archive, which resulted in the publication of six CD-ROMs on Hungarian film history. Between 1997 and 2004, he was a consultant for the subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, the largest Hungarian telecommunications company, and finally became Chief Scientist of the internet provider company of Telekom. During this time, he was actively involved in the launch of the Internet in Hungary. In 1999, together with some university colleagues, he developed a proposal to the Hungarian cultural government for the establishment of an audiovisual archive for the archiving of radio and TV programs, and after the government set up the new institution, he was one of the designers of the metadata model of the National Audiovisual Archive. At the same time, he was the designer and leader of the Hungarian National Digital Archive (2003-2004). Between 2009 and 2011, he was responsible for the development of the reorganised portal in the ENCOMPASS - University of Omniscience 2.0 project, supervised by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 2014-2020, he was the initiator and professional leader of the project led by the National Library to design and build a national name space for the interoperability of databases of national memory institutions.