21st July 2008

Alistair Miles . Alistair's background is in the development of Web technologies for scientific applications. He was a research associate in the e-Science department of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, where he was introduced to Semantic Web technologies and first developed SKOS. He has recently moved to the University of Oxford to work on linking fruit fly genomics research data, and he hopes everything he knows about the Semantic Web will turn out to be useful after all.

Antoine Isaac has been working for a number of years on figuring out how Semantic Web technology can be successfully used in Cultural Heritage environment. He is currently engaged as a post-doctoral researcher at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and Koninklijke Bibliotheek where he works on the representation and interoperability of cultural heritage collections and their vocabularies (STITCH and TELplus projects). He is a member of the W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Wroup and is involved in the design of SKOS [read more].

Stella Dextre Clarke is an independent consultant specializing in the design and implementation of knowledge structures, including thesauri and taxonomies. She is active on the BSI committee responsible for standards on indexes, filing and thesauri, and Convenor of the Working Group that has just completed BS 8723, a revision of the British Standards for thesauri. She now leads Project ISO NP 25964, which aims to bring out an International Standard based on BS 8723. Stella is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. Her work on the vocabulary standards was recognised in 2006 when she won the Tony Kent Strix Award for outstanding achievement in information retrieval.

Leonard Will is an independent consultant in information management, with a particular interest in subject retrieval schemes such as thesauri and faceted classification. He was previously Head of Library and Information Services at the Science Museum , London and before that Head of Information and Research Services in the Library of the City University, London. He was a member of the working party that developed BS8723: "Structured vocabularies for information retrieval - guide" and is a member of the ISO working party developing the international equivalent [read more].

Nicolas Cochard is an employee of Porism Limited who was responsible for managing and hosting various knowledge structures for public organisations in the UK such as IPSV (Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary) and LGSL (Local Government Services List). He also contributed to the definition of part 5 of the standard BS8723 (currently known as DD 8723-5) by editing the model (UML class diagram) and the corresponding XML Schema.

Ceri Binding is a Research Associate in the Hypermedia Research Unit, Faculty of Advanced Technology, University of Glamorgan. Ceri graduated with a BSc in Computer Studies in 1997 whilst working as an Analyst Designer / Programmer for Hyder IT, before joining Glamorgan in 2000. He had responsibility for development work on the FACET project and implemented various standalone and web systems for the project. He is currently conducting research and development work for the STAR project, involving use of SKOS and CRM data. Related research interests include Knowledge Organisation Systems, intelligent web-based retrieval and interface design [read more].

Douglas Tudhope is Professor in the Faculty of Advanced Technology, University of Glamorgan and leads the Hypermedia Research Unit. His area of research is Knowledge Organisation Systems and Services. He was PI on the EPSRC FACET project in collaboration with the Science Museum and Museum Documentation Association and is PI on an AHRC project (Semantic Technologies for Archaeological Resources) in collaboration with English Heritage. He is Editor of the journal, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia and acting Theme Editor, Information Discovery, Journal of Digital Information (JoDI). He was an author of the recent JISC State of the art review on Terminology Services and Technology [read more].

Bernard Vatant has a background in mathematics, knowledge representation and science popularization. He has been Senior Consultant in Knowledge Engineering for Mondeca since 2000. His work includes modeling of customers ontologies, and migration of data and vocabularies to semantic formats, in a wide range of industries and domains (legal publication, medical terminologies, tourism and territorial information, museography, sports, mechanical industries ...). Involved in several working groups dedicated to semantic languages (Topic Maps, OWL, SKOS) and tools, he champions the early adoption of those tools in challenging industrial environments, pushing SKOS as a key element of the production line in Mondeca's solutions. Bandwidth permitting, he's been supporting the Linked Data movement, providing input such as the Geonames ontology.