Jans Aasman started his career as an experimental and cognitive psychologist, earning his Ph.D in cognitive science with a detailed model of car driver behavior using Lisp and Soar. He has spent most of his professional life in telecommunications research, specializing in intelligent user interfaces and applied artificial intelligence projects. From 1995 to 2004 he was also a part-time professor in the Industrial Design department of the Technical University of Delft. Jans is currently the CEO of Franz Inc., the leading supplier of commercial, persistent and scalable RDF database products that provide the storage layer for powerful reasoning and ontology modeling capabilities for Semantic Web applications.

Dean Allemang, the chief scientist at TopQuadrant Inc., specializes in innovative applications of knowledge technology. He brings to this tutorial workshop four years experience teaching semantic technologies in TopQuadrant's highly successful Semantic Technology Training series. As a Semantic Web expert, he integrates into TopQuadrant's products and services more than 15 years experience in research, deployment and development of knowledge-based systems. Though he is the one running TopQuadrant's semantic web training course, he learns more from the students than they ever guess. Synergistic with insights gained and content from the course, Dean is currently writing a book with Jim Hendler on Semantic Modeling using RDFS and OWL. His laptop is full of Semantic Web software, and he even knows how to use more than half of it.

"It's an exciting time," says Allemang, "for those of us who have been fans of abstraction for the past three decades." Dr. Allemang was awarded his PhD in AI in 1990, worked at five different AI labs in Europe between 1990-1996, and co-founded a company in the mid-90s that tried to invent the Semantic Web when the standards were just a gleam in the eye of a few W3C folks.

Melli Annamalai has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and is a product manager for the the Semantic Technologies group at Oracle. She is a member of the W3C Semantic Web and Outreach Group and was a member of the W3c Multimedia Semantics Incubator Group. Her responsibilities at Oracle include understanding customer requirements and helping them use Oracle Database Semantic technology in their applications.

Sören Auer leads the research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) at the department Business Information Systems (University of Leipzig) and collaborates with the database research group at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Sören is founder of several high-impact research and community projects such as the Wikipedia knowledge extraction project DBpedia, the open-source innovation platform Cofundos.org, or the social Semantic Web toolkit OntoWiki. His latest project - Triplify.org - provides a building block for the “semantification” of Web applications such as the million times deployed Drupal, Wordpress or MediaWiki. Triplify is a small plugin, which reveals the semantic structures encoded in relational databases by making the database content available as RDF, JSON and Linked Data. Sören is author of over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications, co-organiser of several workshops, chair of the Social Semantic Web conference 2007 and I-Semantics 2008 and member of the advisory board of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Michael K. Bergman is the CEO of Zitgist LLC, a Linked Data products and services company, and an authoritative blogger on structured and semantic Web topics and tools. He previously founded and was CEO of the two software companies, BrightPlanet and VisualMetrics. Mike’s professional focus for the past 15 years has been the integration and inter-operability of unstructured, semi-structured and structured data. He is a noted author and wrote the first definitive study on the deep Web, a term he coined. A more detailed bio is on his Web site, AI3, http://www.mkbergman.com.

A graduate of Oxford University, England, Tim Berners-Lee holds the 3Com Founders chair and is a Senior Research Scientist at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is co-Director of the new Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) and is a Chair in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK. He directs the World Wide Web Consortium, founded in 1994.

In 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.

In 2001 he became a fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germany's Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth. He is the author of "Weaving the Web".

Geoff is the Founder and CEO of m2mi Corporation which is known for ground breaking machine-to-machine intelligence technology developed with NASA, THE Department of Defense and Siemens. Prior to founding m2mi, Geoff was the VP and Business Development for Pillar Data Systems. Geoff was previously the global lead for Oracle Corporation's Emerging and Advanced Technologies. In that capacity, he pioneered EAI, B2B, Grid Computing and Semantic Web in the marketplace in collaboration with Oracle's top-tier premier customers. Geoff coined the term and definition of "semantic interoperability". Geoff is a member of NASA's Advanced Technology Working Group and a board member of the World-Wide Consortium for the Grid (W2COG).

William Cohen received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Duke University in 1984, and a PhD in Computer Science from Rutgers University in 1990. From 1990 to 2000 Dr. Cohen worked at AT&T Bell Labs and later AT&T Labs-Research, and from April 2000 to May 2002 Dr. Cohen worked at Whizbang Labs, a company specializing in extracting information from the web. Dr. Cohen is member of the board of the International Machine Learning Society, is an Associate Editor for the journal Artificial Intelligence, and has served as an action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the journal Machine Learning and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He was Program Co-Chair of the 2006 International Machine Learning Conference and Co-Chair of the 1994 International Machine Learning Conference, and has served on more than 20 program committees or advisory committees. Dr. Cohen is also General Chair for the 2008 International Machine Learning Conference, which will be held July 6-9 at the University of Helsinki, in Finland. Dr. Cohen's research interests include information integration and machine learning, particularly information extraction, text categorization and learning from large datasets. He holds seven patents related to learning, discovery, information retrieval, and data integration, and is the author of more than 100 publications.

Taylor received an MS degree in Computer Science from the University of North Texas. Currently he works for Sabre where he specialized in localization and disambiguation of geo/local input for travelocity.com. He is actively pursuing applications of semantic web technology for the travel industry within Sabre Labs and is intimately familiar with many challenges facing online travel.

Stefanos Damianakis is president and CEO of Netrics, as well as a prominent technology thought-leader in intelligent data matching technologies. Stef brings nearly 20 years of experience in scientific research and business management to Netrics, leveraging his unique skills in technology transfer to lead the overall strategic direction of the company and guide the ongoing development of the Netrics product line. Prior to joining Netrics, Stef worked at prestigious research institutions, including the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, NEC Research Institute, Panasonic Research Labs and Princeton University. Stef holds Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Computer Science from Princeton University and a B.S. degree in Computer Science from McGill University.

Ian joined Talis in June 2005 having worked as an independent technology consultant since 1995. During that time as well as consulting for multi-national corporations including Sony and Worldcom he founded three technology start-ups in the areas of large scale search, syndication and semantic web architectures. Ian is responsible for Talis' Platform division, engagement with the developer community and coordinates involvement with standards bodies. Ian holds a BSc in Theoretical Physics, from the University of London.

Jeffrey Deskins is a Principal Consultant at JustSystems and has nearly 20 years experience in information development technology. Previously a Services Manager and Solutions Architect at Iditarod Systems, Jeff was instrumental in the implementation of S1000D for the Boeing 787 – the first use of S1000D for civilian aircraft. Before Iditarod, Jeff was a Principal Consultant and Solutions Architect for Arbortext, developing enterprise publishing solutions in various vertical industries including Aerospace, Life Sciences, Pharmaceutical, Automotive, and Manufacturing. Jeff has worked in a variety of information development roles for Bombardier, McDonnell Douglas, and Rockwell International, as a technical writer and SGML analyst.

Rebecca is Vice President for Software Development at SynapticMash, a startup building a next generation learning management system and professional development portal for educators. Rebecca has been key contributor in industry developing technologies that have become what is now the foundation for Web 2.0 and Social Networking. Formerly at Microsoft, she launched major products for the Windows Communication Framework and System Center, drove what became Microsoft's most active developer portal on TechNet, and architected a solutions-focused track of 24 talks on connected systems for Microsoft's largest developer conference, Tech Ed. While at Microsoft, Rebecca also drove strategic planning for a mature, growing multi-billion dollar IT Management business, emphasizing device management and datacenter automation.

Bob DuCharme is a Solutions Architect at Innodata Isogen. Before that, he played a lead role in XML work at LexisNexis and Moody's Investors Service. He's written four books and nearly one hundred on-line and print articles about information technology, and maintains a blog on markup and publishing technology at www.snee.com/bobdc.blog.

Seth Earley has been implementing content management projects for 14 years and been in the technology field for 20+ years. He is founder of the Boston Knowledge Management Forum and co-author of Practical Knowledge Management from the IBM Press. He is former adjunct professor at Northeastern University, where he taught graduate courses in Knowledge Management Infrastructure. Seth has developed content strategies for global organizations and developed underlying taxonomies for a diverse roster of Fortune 1000 companies. He is a speaker and workshop leader at conferences throughout North America speaking on content management systems and strategy, taxonomy development and related topics.

Taylor Cowan and Jay Fichialos will present this session based on their collaboration in the conception and development of Tripblox and other projects. Taylor is a specialist in Java and semantic web technologies. His current interests are applying microformats and RDF to travel planning websites. Jay is an accomplished interaction designer and research scientist. His most recent work has been centered around enterprise social networking.

Tom Heath is a Researcher at Talis, one of the primary UK companies working in the Semantic Web/Linked Data field, and a PhD candidate at The Open University's Knowledge Media Institute. He has been a member of the Linking Open Data project since its inception, developing the linked data-based reviewing and rating site Revyu.com, winner of the 2007 Semantic Web Challenge. Tom co-authored the tutorial "How to Publish Linked Data on the Web", the primary resource for Linked Data publishers, and has spoken on the subject of Linked Data at a number of conferences, including www2007 and WWW2008.

Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Senior Constellation Chair at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he has appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Cognitive Science Dept. He also serves as the Associate Director of the Web Science Research Initiative headquartered at MIT. Hendler is the "et" in Berners-Lee et al, the 2001 Scientific American article on the Semantic Web. Hendler is the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002, and is a former member of the World Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web Coordination Group. He is the Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.

Kingsley Idehen is the founder and CEO of OpenLink Software Inc. He is an industry-acclaimed technology innovator and entrepreneur, and one of the very few individuals who have actively participated in standards compliant technology innovation across several eras ranging from early Data Access Middleware and Database Virtualization, to XML-based Web Services and Web 2.0, and now to the Semantic Web. He is also one of the handful of founding CEOs from the early '90s who remain at the helm of the companies they founded.

Dr. Anant Jhingran is a Distinguished Engineer, VP and CTO for IBM's Information Management Division. He is responsible for the technical strategy of products and solutions in databases, content management, business intelligence and information integration. Prior to this job, Dr. Jhingran lead the IBM team designing and building solutions to meet the requirements of business analytics on structured and unstructured data. He has also been the director of Computer Science at the IBM Almaden Research Center and before that, senior manager for e-Commerce and data management at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center. He received his Ph.D. from UC at Berkeley in 1990. Anant has received several patents and awards for DB2, and is also a member of IBM Academy of Technology.

Atanas Kiryakov is head of Ontotext lab (of Sirma Group) - an outstanding Semantic Web technology provider; the laboratory is involved in research projects for more than 80 MEuro. Kiryakov joined Sirma as a software engineer in 1993 to become partner and member of the board later on and found Ontotext in year 2000. His current research interests are in semantic annotation and search, large-scale semantic repositories and reasoning, ontology design, information extraction. He is author of more than 20 articles and book chapters. Borislav Popov joined Ontotext short after its founding and participated in several projects related to semantic annotation. He was in charge of the Ontotext's participation in several projects, including PrestoSpace and MediaCampaign, concerning A/V archive management and media research. He is author of more than 10 articles in areas ranging from Hidden-Markov Models to Semantic Annotation. Popov is leading the development of the KIM semantic annotation platform since year 2002. His current research interests are massive-scale semantic annotation, web mining and innovative approaches to searching.

Ashok Malhotra has a Ph.D. from M.I.T and over 25 years of research experience at the IBM Thomas. J. Watson Research Center. He is the author of over 50 papers and holds a number of patents on a variety of subjects including Application Development, Database Access Technology and Visualization. For the past several years he has been working on XML and Web Services development and standards and has authored a number of publications. He now works for Oracle in the area of XML and Web Services Standards and Technology. Ashok is a member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG).

Jim has been the SQL standard editor for more than two decades, and has published five books addressing that standard. He helped develop SQL/XML, specifying technology for effectively using SQL and XML together. Jim is Co-Chair of the W3C's XML Query WG and an editor of several specifications associated with XQuery. In 2006, he published (with Stephen Buxton) "Querying XML: XQuery, XPath, and SQL/XML in Context". Jim is a frequent speaker at conferences on subjects related to the Web and its underlying technologies. His attention has turned to the Semantic Web and problems of integrating disparate data (semi-)automatically.

Ken North is an author, speaker and consultant. His teaches Expert Series seminars and his articles have appeared in dozens of computing industry publications. Ken has organized and moderated expert panels at dozens of software, database and IT events in Europe and North America.

Uche Ogbuji is a Computer Engineer specializing in the integration of next-generation Web systems with established enterprise technology. He's a leading expert in data design and distributed systems, having worked with XML, RDF and Web Services since the inception of those technologies. He co-develops 4Suite, an open-source platform for XML and RDF processing. He's lead designer of the Versa RDF query language and several other influential technical reports. He's a columnist for IBM developerWorks, Application Development Trends and XML.com. He has written over 300 articles on XML, Web Services and RDF in recognized publications, and speaks extensively at conferences worldwide.

Nikita Ogievetsky is a head of Common Business Components at Morgan Stanley GWMG. Prior to joining Morgan Stanley, Nikita advised top Finance, Publishing and Manufacturing companies as an expert in Information Architecture, Data Modeling and Knowledge Sharing and Visualization. He leads the community in finding simple solutions for real-life-problems on the enterprise scale. Nikita contributed to the XTM 1.0 specification and is a founding member of TopicMaps.Org. He is a regular presenter on international conferences, and has numerous publications on the subjects of XML, XSLT, Knowledge Technologies, and general computer science. As an author, he has contributed to a number of magazines and books including “XML TopicMaps” and “XSLT Cookbook” and “Advanced XML Applications from the Experts at The XML Guild”.

Eghosa Omoigui is the Technical Assistant to the President of Intel Capital. As Chief of Staff for the world’s largest corporate technology investing organization, he assists the ICap President in day-to-day operations and strategic planning, setting and implementing overall org strategy, direction and execution, and maintaining the organization’s visibility and ecosystem leadership worldwide.

Walter Perry, PhD. has more than 20 years experience in solving data integration problems. At Fiduciary Automation he designs, implements and (most crucially) maintains systems for compliance and tax reporting of transnational financial transactions. By their nature these transactions span widely varying systems and software, but also regulatory philosophies and jurisdictions as well as divergent cultural and business practices. Fiduciary Automation's solutions have been entirely markup-based for 10 years and in the past two years have been grounded in a semantic-, rather than a syntactic-based philosophy of integration.

Irene Polikoff is an executive partner and co-founder of TopQuadrant, the first US company established to help customers implement solutions to business problems using the Semantic Web standards and technology. Over the last six years Irene has been involved in more than a dozen projects, both with government and with commercial organizations. She has written strategy papers, trained customers on the use of the Semantic Web standards, developed ontology models, designed solution architectures and defined deployment processes and guidance. With the evolution of TopQuadrant from a technology consultant to a technology provider, Irene has been playing an active role in requirements and design of TopQuadrant's Semantic Solution Platform - TopBraid Suite. Before starting TopQuadrant, Irene was a principal in the national Knowledge, Content Management and Portals Practice in IBM Global Services. Prior to that she was a senior development manager and a project executive for IBM worldwide consultant's tools and methods. Irene can be reached at: irene (at) topquadrant.com

Barak joined ClearForest as its CEO in early 2000 and has since been actively involved in the evolving Text Analytics market and its applications in both Business Intelligence and Information Retrieval. The company maintains a list of blue chip customers that include Dow Chemical, The World Bank, Procter and Gamble and Glaxo Smithkline. ClearForest was acquired by Reuters in June of 2007, as the core element in developing context as an asset that is derivable from Reuters' content. Barak now leads that strategy for Reuters. At the end of 2007, after living in the US for 8 years, Barak moved back to Israel with his wife and two sons.

Andy Seaborne is a member of the Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories Semantic Web group and represented HP on the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group where he was co-editor of the SPARQL query language specification. He is also a contributor to the Jena open source semantic be framework, working on all aspects of the SPARQL implementation. Originally with a MA in Mathematics and PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University (UK), he is currently interested in the application of the semantic web to enterprise information systems.

Robert Shimp is Vice President of the Global Technology Business Unit for Oracle Corporation. He is responsible for global marketing and sales support for Oracle's Database, Fusion Middleware, Enterprise Manager and other product lines. Robert played a key role in the emergence of Oracle's grid computing and SOA technologies. He is also the architect behind several popular marketing campaigns for Oracle such as "Unbreakable" and "Get on the Grid". Prior to that, Mr. Shimp was involved with the development and introduction of well-known brand name products including Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX operating system, MIPS microprocessors, and the UnixWare operating system. Mr. Shimp holds a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering and in Engineering & Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. He also holds a Master of Business Administration degree and a Juris Doctorate from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Alex Spinelli is the CTO, Reuters News. He responsible for technology and operations for the creation and distribution of Reuters' news, reporting to the company's COO. Previously Alex served as CTO and a senior technology executive for financial services and media companies such TheStreet.com, AXA Technology and Viacom.

Amber Swope is a Principal Consultant at JustSystems, where she applies her information architecture and DITA experience to help clients address their business challenges. An experienced information architect with almost 20 years in the information development field, Amber has supported teams through the full information development lifecycle. Her experience includes architecting and developing information for companies of various sizes, as well as managing teams and projects. At IBM, she led the first HTML to DITA migration project for the Rational division and implemented DITA in a production environment. Amber is also a member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee.

Starting in the mid nineties, I developed digital asset management system as CTO for an Los Angeles based Web services firm using methods very similar to what would result in being Semantic Web. Throughout this decade, in various CTO/VP Engineering positions I have focused on developing technologies for media search, recommendations systems and matching systems. In 2005 I formed Relevant Digital, and New York company that specializes in Semantic Discovery systems. I have been working with Semantic Technologies through out this decade and they are the sole focus of our company.

Giovanni Tummarello, Ph.D, is a Researcher and Adjunct Lecturer at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Galway where he leads the Data Intensive Infrastructures research unit. He has a background in computer science and computational intelligence and is well known for many all round Semantic Web projects such as the DBin Semantic platform (http://dbin.org , awarded at the international semantic web conference 2007), Semantic Web Pipes (http://pipes.deri.org), the semantic Sitemap Extension (http://sw.deri.org/2007/07/sitemapextension/), and the Sindice Semantic Web Search Engine (http://sindice.com). He is author of over 40 scientific articles, organizer of international workshops (last one held at the last WWW conference) and co-authors of 3 EU funded projects. Founder of the Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives conference (www.swap.it/2007 now at the 4th edition with 14 industrial sponsors)

Dr. Rachel Yager specializes in developing strategies for using new emerging Web technologies to attain high impact business solutions. She has expertise in computational intelligence, knowledge engineering, and business analytics for decision support. Rachel has been an advisor to Fortune 100 senior executives in emerging technologies, helping companies to accelerate technology transfer from leading research and academic institutions. Rachel had directed Internet strategies and delivered client services for Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and Ernst & Young. She has extensive experience in enterprise-wide financial services IT initiatives, external partnerships and international collaborative efforts. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Information Systems.