Semantic Web Days
2005

Biographies

Keynotes

Ivan Herman

Ivan Herman is Head of Offices for the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, whilst maintaining a staff position at the Dutch national research institute, CWI. Before joining W3C Ivan worked in quite different areas (distri 27-feb-08 programming), but he spend most of his research years in computer graphics and vi 27-feb-08 lated ISO standardization activities and software developments. He was member of the Executive Committee of the Eurographics Association for 15 years, and vice-chair of Association between 2000 and 2002. He was the co-chair of the 9th World Wide Web Conference, in Amsterdam, May 2000. He is also member of IW3C2, the committee responsible for the World Wide Web Conference series. He has lectured extensively on W3C standards.

Hermann Friedrich

Hermann Friedrich graduated in "Computer Science" at the Technical University of Munich. Since September 1996, he has been working for Siemens AG in Munich. First, he worked as in-house consultant with a focus on software development process assessment and improvement. Since 2004, he has been department head of the Competence Centre "Knowledge Management" of SIEMENS Corporate Technology with global locations in Munich and Princeton, USA .

Openings

Massimo Marchiori

Massimo Marchiori received his M.S. in Mathematics with Highest Honors, and the Ph.D. in Computer Science with a thesis that won an EATCS (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science) best Ph.D. thesis award. Before joining W3C at MIT in 1998, he has worked at the University of Padua and at CWI (The Dutch National Research Center). Massimo now holds a double position as research scientist at MIT ( Laboratory for Computer Science in The World Wide Web Consortium ), and as research professor in Computer Science at the University of Venice . He got a variety of awards, including the IBM young scientist award , the Lifetime Membership Award of the Oxford Society for "his lifetime achievements, and the efforts for the development of an XML Query standard" and in 2004 the TR100 award given to the world top 100 young innovators in technology.

Jérôme Euzenat

Dr. Jérôme Euzenat is a Senior Research Scientist at INRIA Rhône-Alpes in Montbonnot (France) where he leads the Exmo team. He holds a PhD (1990) and habilitation (1999) in computer science, both from Grenoble 1 university. Jérôme has worked for Cognitech, Bull artificial intelligence division and Ilog as well as a consultant for end-users. His work has first focused on object-based knowledge representation and semantics, collaborative building of consensual knowledge bases and semantic web technologies for overcoming heterogeneity. He published papers in domains including reasoning maintenance systems, object-based knowledge representation, symbolic temporal granularity, collaborative knowledge base construction and semantic web technologies. Jérôme has taken part in several international and national projects (AIDA, 1992; Sachem 1992; GREG 1993-95; SToRIA, 1996-98; Génie II 1998-2000; OntoWeb 2001-2004; Knowledge Web 2004-2007). He is co-editor of the first scholarly book on the semantic web, "The emerging semantic web", was general chair of the last European Semantic Web Conference and is vice-scientific director of the Knowledge Web Network of Excellence.

Workshop "Industrial Applications of Semantic Web"

Richard Benjamins

Dr. V.R. (Richard) Benjamins is Director of Research & Development and board member at Intelligent Software Components (iSOCO) in Madrid, Spain. He co-founded iSOCO in June 1999, and contributed to its start-up (now 70 persons) and international positioning as a Semantic Web Solutions company. He is also part time professor at the Technical University of Madrid. He has acquired and managed over 5 million euro in R&D projects in advanced Information Technologies related to the Internet. Before working at iSOCO, Dr. Benjamins had a permanent position at the University of Amsterdam in the area of Knowledge Systems Technology (1998-2000). Between 1993 and 1998, he worked at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, the University of Paris-South, France, and the Spanish Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain. Dr. Benjamins published over 80 scientific articles in books, journals and proceedings, in areas such as Knowledge Technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Management, Semantic Web and Ontologies. He has been guest editor of several journal special- issues, serves on many international program committees, and has been co-chair of numerous international workshops and conferences. He is member of the editorial board of IEEE Intelligent Systems and of Web Semantics (Elsevier). Richard Benjamins received his Master's Degree (1988) and Ph.D. (1993) in Cognitive Science from the University of Amsterdam. Contact him at rbenjamins_at_isoco_dot_com.

Juergen Angele

Prof. Dr. Angele Jürgen is currently CEO, CTO and shareholder of Ontoprise GmbH, a provider of semantic technologies. Ontoprise has been cofounded by him in 1999. In 1994 he became a full professor in applied computer science at the University of Applied Sciences, Braunschweig, Gemany. From 1989 to 1994 he was a research and teaching assistant at the University of Karlsruhe , Institute AIFB. He did research on the execution of the knowledge acquisition and representation language KARL, which led to a Ph.D. (Dr. rer. pol.) from the University of Karlsruhe in 1993. From 1985 to 1989 he worked for the companies AEG, Konstanz , Germany , and SEMA GROUP, Ulm , Germany . He received the diploma degree in computer science in 1985 from the University of Karlsruhe . He published around 75 papers as books and journal, book, conference, and workshop contributions. Topics were about semantic web, semantic technologies, knowledge representation, and their practical applications. He is leading several research and commercial projects. He gave more than 55 courses at Berufsakademien, Fachhochschulen and Universities. Topics were about: Expert Systems, Software Engineering, World Wide Web, Database Systems, Digital Image Analysis, Computer Graphics, Mathematics. He supervised around 30 master theses and Ph.Ds.

Anita de Waard

Drs. Anita de Waard has a background in experimental physics, which she studied in Leiden and Moscow . In 1988 she joined Elsevier, where she worked as publisher in physics and neurology. Since 1997 she works as Senior Development Manager in the Advanced Technology Group. She is the founder of the Reed-Elsevier Data Standards Group, and received the Reed-Elsevier Technology Values award in innovation in 2004, for her work with academic institutes on Drug ontologies and Medical Guidelines. Her specific interests include the application of Semantic Web technologies for scientific communication, and the development of a new, modular form for the scientific article. See publications at http://labs.elsevier.com/resources/adw/changingdoc/adw.htm .

Atanas Kiryakov

Atanas Kiryakov obtained his M.Sc. degree in CS from the Sofia University, Bulgaria in 1995 with a thesis on knowledge representation (KR). His research interests cover KR, ontology design and management, lexical semantics, reasoning, information extraction, information retrieval. Kiryakov lectured courses in KR at the Sofia University; he is an organizer and a member of program committees of a number of international forums; author of more than 20 publications. Mr. Kiryakov joined Sirma as a software engineer in 1993 and became a partner in 1996. He has led projects in the areas of CASE, CSCW, and b2b for big corporations and government organisations in US and Canada. Since 2000 he is a member of the board of Sirma Group and head of Ontotext Lab. Kiryakov has led Ontotext in multiple European research projects, among which On-To-Knowledge and DIP. Between 2001 and 2004, Kiryakov was a member of the board of BASSCOM and the chairman of its Working Group on Education, Research and Innovations.

Workshop "Vocabularies and Rules for Enterprise Applications "

Silvie Spreeuwenberg

Drs. S. Spreeuwenberg has a background in artificial intelligence and 8 years of experience in business rules modeling and application development where business rules play an important role. She is the co-founder and director of LibRT. LibRT helps customers to assess and improve the quality of business rules. In the last 5 years the speaker has been involved in developing VALENS, a tool to support verification, validation and visualisation of business rules. Silvie has written several articles on this topic that were accepted as papers at international conferences and the tool is now used in commercial environments. Being the first one putting verification on the agenda of the rule based system community LibRT's focus has become the broader market of supporting the delivery of high quality business rules. A standardized way of communicating business rules is an important step forwards in this enterprise. Therefore Silvie is involved in the business rules work group of the OMG working on standardization of business rules and a member of the REWERSE Network of Excellence.

Donald Baisley

Don Baisley is lead architect at Unisys for Rules Modeler, a toolset supporting the Business Rules Approach. Don represents Unisys on OMG's Business Rules SIG and is a coauthor of the coming OMG Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules specification. Previously, Don contributed to several OMG specifications, including UML, MOF, XMI and CWM. Don started with Unisys (then Burroughs) in 1979 and worked in a "Languages" group where he led development of compilers, interactive debuggers and a system message editor supporting multilingual system messages and comparative translation. Don graduated with a Bachelor of Science from Brigham Young University.

Workshop "Semantic Web Services in Industry"

Jens Lemcke

Jens Lemcke works for SAP Research at the CEC Karlsruhe. He mainly contributes to the DIP project in the field of Semantic Web technology and Semantic Web Services. Jens' major research interest is in Ontologies and Process Mediation. Prior to his employment at SAP AG, Jens studied Computer Science at the University of Rostock, specializing in modeling and simulation. During his studies, he completed a one-year internship at the Silicon Valley Lab of IBM (California). There, he was mainly concerned with performance evaluation and optimization of database replication. Back to University, Jens dived into component based modeling in Systems Biology, where he came in touch with the semantic decoration of model components.

Steve Battle

Dr Steve Battle works in HP Labs in the UK , applying the Semantic Web to Service Oriented Architectures across the company. He is investigating the development of next-generation standards that extend the existing web-service architecture and embrace the tools and technologies of the semantic web. He contributed to the Semantic Web Services Initiative, and recently co-chaired the W3C Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services.

Christian de Sainte Marie

Christian de Sainte Marie is director for Standards and Technology Partnerships at ILOG. He represents ILOG at the W3C advisory committee and at the OMG, where he is active in the specification of the Production Rules Representation meta-model. He co-chaired the W3C workshop on rule languages for interoperability that was held in April 2005 in Washington , DC . Christian de Sainte Marie holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich ( Switzerland ). After a short time in the industry, he joined the institute for Applied Mathematics in Grenoble ( France ), where he earned a PhD in Computer Science. In 1988, he started his own company to do contract research for the defense and the industry. In 1993, he joined ITMI, a company of the CAP GEMINI group, as technical manager in charge of advanced projects. He then moved to ILOG in 1998, to join the R&D department as manager of the research projects.

Presentation

Hans Jürgen Ohlbach

After Prof. Ohlbach got his first degree in nuclear physics, he moved into the field of Artificial Intelligence and Automated Reasoning. His PhD was about Reasoning for Modal Logics. From 1990 until 1996 he worked in Harald Ganzinger's group at the Max-Planck Institute in Saarbruecken. Then he worked together with Dov Gabbay in London , first at Imperial College , then at King's College. Since 2000 he is Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. Currently he is deputy coordinator of the EU Network of Excellence REWERSE (Reasoning with Rules and Semantics) and coordinator of a workpackage where temporal and spatial world models for the Semantic Web are being developed.

Workshop "Semantic Web for Life Sciences"

Michael Alvers

Michael Alvers received a degree in Geophysics. Among his activities around that time was a scientific expedition to Andes and North Pole. In 1994 he held a one year research position at Stanford University. 1998 Michael Alvers earned his PhD with a thesis on model optimization. He then spent five years working as Director Product Marketing at DEFINIENS AG. He worked closely together with Gerd Binning (Nobel Laureat, 1986 physics) and designed the Proteomweaver. 2004 he was director business and product development at interactive Systems GmbH, Berlin, Germany. Presently he is founder and managing director of Transinsight GbR, Berlin (founded 2002).

Michael Schroeder

Michael Schroeder received his PhD in 1997 from the University of Hanover and Lisbon. From 1998 to 2003 he was Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computing, City University, London, UK. Since 2003 Michael Schroeder is Professor in Bioinformatics at the Biotec and Department of Computing, TU Dresden. He is author of over 80 scientific publications and his main interests are reasoning over protein interaction networks derived from 3D protein structures and extracted from text.

Panel discussion "Earning Money with Semantic Web Technologies"

Pia Grund-Ludwig

Pia Grund-Ludwig is working as an IT journalist for nearly 20 years. She started her career as an editor of the german IT weekly journal Computer Zeitung. For 9 years she is writing as a freelancer for leading economic newspapers and IT publications. She is covering the topic Semantic Web technologies for four years, and is in general focussing on Internet and Web related technologies.

Susie Stephens

Dr Susie Stephens joined Oracle in 2002 to lead the development of the Database, Application Server and Collaboration Suite, to further enhance their capabilities as a powerful infrastructure platform and analytical engine for drug discovery. In 1998, following a molecular biology post-doc and physiology Ph.D., she joined Sun Microsystems as a Pre-Sales Systems Engineer aligned to the pharmaceutical industry. In 2000, she was promoted to the global position of Life Sciences Market Segment Manager at Sun, where she played a key role in establishing Sun's presence in the life sciences industry. Her technical roles at Oracle and Sun Microsystems, combined with her life sciences background, enable Dr. Stephens to have a valuable perspective on the application of IT to drug discovery.

Massimo Marchiori

Massimo Marchiori received his M.S. in Mathematics with Highest Honors, and the Ph.D. in Computer Science with a thesis that won an EATCS (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science) best Ph.D. thesis award. Before joining W3C at MIT in 1998, he has worked at the University of Padua and at CWI (The Dutch National Research Center). Massimo now holds a double position as research scientist at MIT ( Laboratory for Computer Science in The World Wide Web Consortium ), and as research professor in Computer Science at the University of Venice . He got a variety of awards, including the IBM young scientist award , the Lifetime Membership Award of the Oxford Society for "his lifetime achievements, and the efforts for the development of an XML Query standard" and in 2004 the TR100 award given to the world top 100 young innovators in technology.

Alexander Linden

Alexander Linden, Ph.D., is a Vice President in Gartner Research covering emerging trends and technologies. He is one of the world-wide leads on advanced information management technologies, and engages in research on strategic technology planning and innovation. Prior to joining Gartner in 1998, Mr. Linden was a senior staff member of General Electric's strategic technology unit in New York. He has worked for several GE business lines, including financial services and manufacturing. Previous to that, Mr. Linden was a research scientist at the GMD and a postdoctoral student at ICSI in Berkeley. Mr. Linden holds a master's degree with distinction from Bonn University and a doctorate degree in computer science from Bielefeld University.

Thomas Syldatke

Thomas Syldatke started working for Audi in 1989. Since 1993 he has advanced to the position of project leader with responsibility for the technical development in the area of CAT methods. In the last three years he has gained experience with ontologies in the form of smaller pilot projects. Thomas Syldatke was born in 1963 and received his diploma in business computer science from the FH in Dortmund.