Rohit Khare

Rohit Khare is an Indian American computer scientist and entrepreneur who has been active in many aspects of the development of the World Wide Web. He is the founder of Ångströ, the co-founder of KnowNow, a former director of CommerceNet Labs and a key player in the microformats community. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of California, Irvine in software engineering, and bachelor's degrees from Caltech in Engineering & Applied Science and Economics. He previousl

Background and Education

Rohit Khare holds bachelor's degrees from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Engineering & Applied Science and Economics. He went on to earn both an M.S. and a Ph.D. in software engineering from the University of California, Irvine.

Career

Khare has been involved in multiple facets of the World Wide Web's development across industry, research, and standards communities. Early in his career, he worked on Internet security for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), contributing to foundational web infrastructure efforts.

He later served as a director of CommerceNet Labs, a research arm of the CommerceNet industry consortium focused on advancing electronic commerce technologies.

Khare co-founded KnowNow, a company oriented around real-time web messaging and event-driven architectures. He subsequently founded Ångströ, another venture in the web technology space.

Standards and Community Work

Khare has been an active participant in the Representational State Transfer (REST) community, which centers on the architectural principles underlying the web as articulated by Roy Fielding. In August 2007, he authored the ARRESTED paper, which outlined a syndication-oriented architecture — a variant of service-oriented architecture built around web syndication principles.

He has also been a notable contributor to the microformats community, an effort to embed structured, machine-readable data within standard HTML using simple, open conventions.

Notable Work

Beyond his entrepreneurial ventures, Khare maintained the FoRK mailing list and associated online activities through 4K Associates, serving as a gathering point for discussions at the intersection of technology, culture, and the web.