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Keynote speakers

We are proud to announce that the following experts will give talks and guide hands-on sessions at the Web of Data Practitioners Days:

Keith Alexander

Talis (United Kingdom) FOAF data
Keith Alexander is a Developer working with semantic technologies in the Platform division at Talis. His interests include Linked Data, RDF vocabularies, and building semantic web-applications.

Yves Raimond

Queen Mary University of London/BBC Audio & Music Interactive (United Kingdom) FOAF data
Yves Raimond was until recently a researcher and PhD student at the Electronic Engineering Dept., Queen Mary University of London, where he was associated with the Centre for Digital Music. He is now a Software Engineer at BBC Audio & Music. His research interests include Semantic Web technologies and automated music analysis for enhanced access to music-related information. He is one of the main contributor of the Music Ontology community project and is also involved in the Semantic Web Education and Outreach interest group Linking Open Data on the Semantic Web community project, where he deals with publishing and interlinking music-related structured data on the Web.

Leo Sauermann

German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence DFKI (Germany) FOAF data
Leo Sauermann finished his information science studies with the award-winning diploma thesis "gnowsis", merging Personal Information Management with Semantic Web technologies. He continues working on the Semantic Desktop at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence DFKI since 2004 with the NEPOMUK project. His research focus is on Semantic Web and its use in Knowledge Management. In practice he contributes to open source projects, was member of the W3C SWEO Interest Group, and has been invited to various events to presents these results to the public.

Brian Davis

DERI Galway (Ireland) FOAF data
Brian Davis holds an Honors Bachelor of Science Degree in Applied Computational Linguistics & German from Dublin City University and a Master of Science in Computer Science by Research from Trinity College Dublin. He worked at Sun Microsystems, Dublin for two years as a Software Quality Engineer before joining the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway in 2005, as a Language Engineer. His doctoral research concerns the application of HLT as an interface for non-expert users seeking to create, maintain and access knowledge on the Social Semantic Desktop, specifically Controlled Languages for Ontology Authoring and Semantic Annotation and applied Natural Language Generation (NLG). Other research interests include Ontology Based Information Extraction (OBIE) and more specifically Relation Extraction.

Sören Auer

University of Leipzig (Germany) FOAF data
Sören Auer studied Mathematics and Computer Science in Dresden, Hagen and Ekaterinburg / Russia. Before pursuing a scientific career Sören was managing director of adVIS GmbH, a Dresden-based Internet and IT service provider until 2003. In 2006 he obtained his doctorate in Computer Science from Universität Leipzig. From 2006-2008 he was working with the database research group at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Currently, he leads the research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) at the department Business Information Systems (University of Leipzig). Sören is founder (respectively co-founder) of high-impact research and community projects, e.g. the Wikipedia semantification project DBpedia, the open-source innovation platform Cofundos.org or the social Semantic Web toolkit OntoWiki. Sören is author of over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications, co-organiser of various workshops, chair of the Social Semantic Web conference 2007 and I-Semantics 2008, serves as an expert for industry,the EU, W3C and is member of the advisory board of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Richard Cyganiak

DERI Galway (Ireland) FOAF data
Richard Cyganiak is a research engineer at Sindice, a Web of Data search engine built at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute in Galway, Ireland. Richard has co-authored several foundational documents of the Linked Data field, including the W3C's "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web", and the tutorial “How to publish Linked Data on the Web”. He is creator or main contributor to a number of Linked Data related open-source projects, including the database-to-RDF mapper D2RQ, the Linked Data server Pubby, the RDF Schema editor and publishing system Neologism, and the Semantic Web browser Disco. Richard is a fellow of the Web Science Research Initiative.

Alan Dix

Lancaster University (United Kingdom)
Alan Dix is an expert in the field of human-computer interaction. He is Professor of Computing at Lancaster University and author of one of the key text books in HCI. His early interests in intelligent interfaces include intelligent hypertext in the late 1980s and Query-by-Browsing and automated database query inference in the early 1990s. Latest research activities also include Semantic Web and linked data. Alan is also director of LUBEL (Lancaster University Business Enterprises Ltd).

Ansgar Scherp

University of Koblenz-Landau (Germany)
Ansgar Scherp worked at the University of Oldenburg, Germany on developing methods and tools for virtual laboratories from 2001 to 2002. With a laboratory for genetic engineering, he won the audience award of the MEDIDA-PRIX contest for media-didactics in higher education in 2002 (with M. Schlattmann, A. Hasler, W. Heuten, and R. Kuczewski). From 2003 to 2006, he has been with the research institute OFFIS in Oldenburg. He worked on a project called MM4U (short for "MultiMedia For You"). Within the MM4U project, Mr. Scherp wrote his PhD thesis about the conceptual design and the software engineering issues of the MM4U framework and received his doctoral degree with distinction in August 2006. Subsequently, he spent a one-year research stay at UC Irvine, USA in the frame of a Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellowship granted by the EU. In May 2008, he joined the University of Koblenz, leading the university’s activities in the WeKnowIt project. He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific papers and won the best paper award at the Multimedia Modeling Conference in Melbourne, Australia in 2005.

Danny Ayers

Talis (United Kingdom)
Danny Ayers is known as a long-time advocate of the Semantic Web (and cat lover). Based in Italy, he now works for Talis, a Semantic Web service provider in the UK. In the past he has co-authored various Web-oriented books, been a member of certain W3C (and IETF) Working Groups, been involved in encouraging the Web of Data through conference duties, and has written a lot of RDF-oriented code as a freelance developer.

Thomas Schandl

Semantic Web Company (Austria) FOAF data
Thomas Schandl works for the Semantic Web Company in Vienna as Semantic Web developer and consultant. In 2007 he completed his degree at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administation, after which he worked as visiting researcher at the DERI Galway on the SIOC project and on Neologism. His main interests are online social media, Linked Data and semantic wikis.