Robert McCool

{{short description|Software developer and architect}}

{{about||the Canadian provincial politician|Robert Milton McCool}}

{{Infobox person

| name = Robert McCool

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| birth_name =

| birth_date = {{Birth year and age|1973}}

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| alma_mater = University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

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| employer = {{plainlist|

• NCSA
• Netscape
• Geocast Network Systems
• Alpiri
• Stanford University
• Yahoo!
• OnLive
• Google

}}

| known_for = {{plainlist|

• NCSA HTTPd
• CGI
• NSAPI

}}

| notable_works =

| awards = IMSA 2007 Alumni Trailblazer{{cite web |title=News - Awards - Landing Page - IMSA Alumni |url=http://www.imsaalumni.org/page.aspx?pid=390 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160309072659/http://imsaalumni.org/page.aspx?pid=390 |archive-date=2016-03-09}}

| website = {{URL|http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/people/robm/}}

}}

Robert Martin McCool (born 1973), more commonly known as Rob McCool, is a software developer and architect.{{DBLP |name=Robert Martin McCool}}{{ACMPortal |name=Rob Martin McCool}}{{Scopus |name=Mccool, Rob}}{{AcademicSearch|1613505}}

McCool was the author of the original NCSA HTTPd web server,{{cite web |title=NCSA HTTPd Acknowledgements |url=http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/acknowledgement.html |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20090416132804/http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/acknowledgement.html |archivedate=2009-04-16}} later known as the Apache HTTP Server, and until Apache version 2.2, httpd.conf files as distributed contain comments signed with his name. He wrote the first version while he was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he was working with the original NCSA Mosaic team. His twin brother, Mike, also attended the university and would join the Mosaic team to work on a port of the Mosaic software to the Macintosh computer. The brothers received their bachelor's degrees from the university in 1995. They went to high school at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (class of 1991) and Robert was awarded its Alumni Trailblazer Award at its inaugural award event during its 20th anniversary celebration on April 20, 2007.

One of Robert McCool's many contributions was in drafting the initial specification of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), in collaboration with others on the www-talk mailing list, and providing a reference implementation of CGI in version 1.0 of the NCSA HTTPd web server.{{cite IETF |title=The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Version 1.1 |rfc=3875 |sectionname=Acknowledgements |section=10 |page=32 |last1=Robinson |first1=D. |last2=Coar|first2=K. |date=October 2004 |publisher=IETF |accessdate= }} The CGI specification, introduced in December 1993, turned out to be a key element in making the World Wide Web dynamic and interactive.

McCool was an early Netscape employee, contributing to Netscape Enterprise Server (e.g., NSAPI) and other server-side systems.

Later, at Stanford University, he co-authored the TAP{{Cite journal | last1 = Guha | first1 = R. |authorlink1 = Ramanathan V. Guha| last2 = McCool | first2 = R. |authorlink2 = Robert McCool| doi = 10.1016/S1389-1286(03)00225-1 | title = TAP: A Semantic Web platform | journal = Comput. Netw.| volume = 42 | issue = 5 | pages = 557–577| date = August 2003 }} and KDD systems for automatic augmentation of human-generated web content. He is also the author of various journal and conference articles pertaining to semantic search,{{Cite conference| last1 = Guha | first1 = R. | authorlink1 = Ramanathan V. Guha| last2 = McCool | first2 = R. |authorlink2 = Robert McCool| last3 = Miller | first3 = E. |authorlink3 = Eric J. Miller| doi = 10.1145/775152.775250 | title = Semantic search | work = Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on World Wide Web| conference = WWW'03| pages = 700–709| year = 2003 | isbn = 1-58113-680-3}} semantic web,{{Cite journal | doi = 10.1109/MIC.2005.133| title = Rethinking the Semantic Web, Part 1| journal = IEEE Internet Computing| volume = 9| issue = 6| pages = 86–88| year = 2005| last1 = McCool | first1 = R. | s2cid = 195915060|authorlink1 = Robert McCool}}{{Cite journal | doi = 10.1109/MIC.2006.18| title = Rethinking the semantic Web. Part 2| journal = IEEE Internet Computing| volume = 10| issue = 1| pages = 93–96| year = 2006| last1 = McCool | first1 = R. |authorlink1 = Robert McCool}} and knowledge provenance.

McCool lives in Menlo Park, California.