Speakers

Vladimir Alexiev

Vladimir leads the Data and Ontology Management group at Ontotext Corp, a world leading semantic technology company with particular emphasis on Cultural Heritage. He has a PhD in computing science from University of Alberta, MS in computer science from Technical University of Sofia, PMP certification, Project Risk and Quality Management diploma. He has 25 years of IT experience, of which 18 years of IT PM experience and 6 years of experience with semantic technologies. He is one of the founders of Sirma Group Holding, the largest Bulgarian IT group, and the parent company of Ontotext. He is a Masters-level lecturer in IT PM at New Bulgarian University.

Julia Beck

Julia Beck holds a Master's degree in Computer Science and Language Documentation (Corpus Linguistics) from Kiel University. She is currently developing a VuFind-based search portal for the "Specialised Information Service Performing Arts" at the University Library Frankfurt am Main. In this context, she is modeling Linked Open Data from heterogeneous metadata gathered by libraries, archives and museums from the performing arts domain. Her research interests include the development of Linked Open Data applications as well as Text Mining applications.

John Chapman

John Chapman is Senior Product Manager, Metadata Services for OCLC, where he helps direct product strategy and planning for linked data efforts. He also oversees cataloging applications, including Connexion and WorldShare Record Manager, as well as the WorldCat Metadata API. Prior to working at OCLC, he was Metadata Librarian for the University of Minnesota. During his career in libraries, he has received honors and professional recognition for accomplishments in corporate librarianship, special collections digitization, and metadata standards development.

Corine Deliot

Corine Deliot is a Metadata Analyst at the British Library, where she has worked since 2000. She is currently supporting implementation of the Library’s Collection Metadata Strategy and the development of its linked and open data services. Corine is currently a member of the ISNI Board and has previously represented the British Library on the MARC Advisory Committee (2006-2013) and on the BIBFRAME Early Implementers Group (2012-2013).

Matias Frosterus

Matias Frosterus is a project manager in the National Library of Finland working in the Finto project, which aims to build a national-level ontology service and tools for Finland. He previously worked in the Aalto University researching semantic technologies and now the Finto service is realizing those results. This year he also hopes to finish his PhD on fusing legacy content with the semantic web.

Thomas Gängler

Thomas is a Knowledge Engineer at the local information systems group at Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB). He is involved in the design and development of the open-source data management platform d:swarm right from its beginning in 2013. Since 2007, his focus is on knowledge representation and knowledge management - often in the context of Linked Data, Semantic Web and graph databases. He is an active member in various communities in these fields, e.g., a co-author of the Music Ontology. Furthermore, Thomas has a strong interest in user experience and usability of applications. He graduated from University of Technology Dresden in 2011 with a Diplom in Media Computer Science.
Afterwards, he has been engaged in a start-up called Hojoki that had a similar intend then Slack (amongst others). Finally, before joining SLUB, he worked at a small software company called Avantgarde Labs, where he designed and developed other ETL applications as well. In his spare time, Thomas is interested in arts and music.

Myung-Ja Han

Myung-Ja (“MJ”) Han is a Metadata Librarian and Associate Professor of Library Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her main responsibilities consist of developing application profiles for digital collections and creating, evaluating and enhancing cataloging and metadata work flows. Her research focuses on interoperability of metadata, metadata modeling, bibliographic control in the digital library environment, and the use of Linked Open Data in library service architectures and implementations.

Christina Harlow

Christina works with metadata of all sorts at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, United States.

Jana Hentschke

Jana Hentschke works as metadata librarian at the IT department of the German National Library. As product manager of the Linked Data Service she ensures its maintenance and further development. In the German DINI working group "Competence Center Interoperable Metadata" (KIM) she is leading the team of Linked Library Data players from Germany, Austria and Switzerland which publishes the "Recommendations on the RDF representation of bibliographic data". Jana holds a diploma in information management of the University of Applied Sciences Hanover and started her career analysing, mapping and converting all kind of data from the cultural heritage domain at Göttingen State and University Library.

Ivan Herman

Ivan Herman graduated as mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years (and turned into a computer scientist…). He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry in Munich, Germany, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he has had a tenure position since 1988. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. He joined the W3C Team as Head of W3C Offices in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI. He served as Head of Offices until June 2006, then as Semantic Web Activity Lead until December 2013. Since June of 2013, he is the Digital Publishing Activity Lead.

Pieter Heyvaert

Pieter Heyvaert graduated in July 2014 as Civil Engineer - Computer Science. His thesis had the goal of offering true digital comics using EPUB 3 and the Open Web Platform. His solution incorporates enhanced presentation features and enhances the use of machine-understandable metadata. He is working in the Multimedia Lab of iMinds as a PhD student in the Semantic Web Lab. His personal interests, aside from the IT related topics, also go towards books and comics. While he is open to all genres, his favorites are Science-Fiction and Fantasy.

Patrick Hochstenbach

Patrick Hochstenbach is a digital architect working at Ghent University Library. He contributed to many library projects such as Catmandu, LibreCat, the Static OAI-PMH gateway, SFX and international standards such as OpenURL, OAI-PMH and the Los Alamos Adore framework.

Olaf Janssen

Olaf Janssen (1973) is the Open data and Wikimedia coordinator of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands. He is the man-in-the-middle between the Wikimedia community and the knowledge, collections and data of the KB. In 2013 he initiated the first Wikipedian-in-Residence project in the Netherlands. He was closely involved in the early years of Europeana and was one of the founders of The European Library. Gerard Kuys has been an information architect for almost 20 years now, but managed to uphold his original background as an historian. Coming professionally from general approaches to JSD-inspired software development and from object orientation, he developed an interest in Linked Open Data early on. In the sector of cultural heritage information, where he has been working since 2005 approximately, he and a few like-minded libraries' people successfully advocated the development of a Dutch-language DBpedia as the backbone to an infrastructure for knowledge-sharing in the field of cultural heritage. Currently, Gerard is working as the linked data specialist for the Common Catalogue to the Dutch government's set of Core Registries (Basisregistraties).

Muhammad Javed

Javed works as Ontology Engineer/Semantic Applications Developer at Cornell University. He is extensively involved in revamping of “Cornell VIVO” as Scholars@Cornell - open source VIVO project through DuraSpace. He is also involved in Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L) project. Javed has a broad international education and work experience ranging from Bangladesh, Germany, the UK, Ireland and most recently a biotechnology startup company in Plymouth, Michigan. Javed earned his doctoral degree in the area of Semantic Web from Dublin City University, Ireland, where he acquired research and problem solving skills in large scale, interdisciplinary research projects, specifically in the context of content management and semantic technologies. Javed is also an experienced programmer and has a number of publications to his credit.

Christopher Hanna Johnson

Study of English Literature, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut (BA 1992); Activity in various US companies as a network engineer and as a project manager (1992-2012). Studied Kulturinformatik, Brandenburg Technical University (MA 2014). Software developer for Wikimedia Germany (since 2013). Since Nov. 2015 research assistant of "Projekt Johann Friedrich Blumenbach Online" at the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen as a software developer. Projekt Johann Friedrich Blumenbach Online aims to present the museum collection objects and digitized editions of the works and letters of J.F. Blumenbach. The semantic exploration of the relationships between the text and the objects was the topic of a university study project and the published paper referenced below. Wettlaufer, Jörg; Johnson, Christopher; Scholz, Martin; Fichtner, Mark; Thotempudi, Sree Ganesh: Semantic Blumenbach: Exploration of Text Object Relationships with Semantic Web Technology in the History of Science. In: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH), Special Issue DH2014, 12 S.

Péter Király

Péter Király is a Hungarian software developer and researcher. As a member of Göttingen eResearch Alliance team he helps researchers in research data management activities. He works in different fields, such as searching, presentation and quality measurement of cultural heritage metadata, long term archiving, Digital Humanities. He actively contributed to different Open Source and Open Data projects, eXtensible Catalog, Europeana, Project Gutenberg, The Code4Lib Journal and Hungarian Electronic Library, just to name a few.

Carsten Klee

Carsten Klee has been working at the Berlin State Library since 2000 and the Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB) since 2011. He is a librarian, programmer, metadata expert and semantic web enthusiast. Carsten is responsible for the "ZDB Linked Data Service", member of the DINI AG KIM Titeldaten and DINI AG KIM Bestandsdaten groups. He is the creator of MARCspec - A common MARC record path language, the Enumeration and Chronology of Periodicals Ontology (ECPO) and editor/contributor to various ontologies and software projects like Catmandu. Carsten studied Information Science at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam.

Kevin Koidl

Kevin Koidl is a Technology Entrepreneur in the Digital Content space and co-founder of Wripl Technologies and Kaffeehouse Digital. His background includes Personalisation, Topic Detection and User Engagement Analytics. Kevin holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin in Computer Science and works closely with the ADAPT research centre in Dublin Ireland.

Hugo Manguinhas

Hugo Manguinhas works as a Technical Coordinator for Research & Development at Europeana Foundation. He advises and coordinates the scientific work on Europeana-related projects and participates in the development of Europeana’s own services, in particular for the areas of Linked Open Data, Metadata Enrichment, Vocabulary services and alignment, Data Quality and Crowdsourcing Infrastructure. He has collaborated in projects such as Europeana DSI1, EuropeanaSounds, EuropeanaCreative, EuropeanaChannels and Europeana v3.

Jan Nehring

Jan Nehring is a software developer at German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. He coordinates the software development efforts in the FREME project. His main interests are Natural Language Processing, Software Development and Big Data technologies.

Adrian Pohl

Adrian has been working at the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center (hbz) and promoting open knowledge since 2008. He is primarily working on hbz's linked open data service lobid focusing on project management, metadata and vocabularies. He has been on the SWIB organizing team since 2011.

Nicolas Prongué, Felix Bensmann

Felix Bensmann is a research associate at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. After studying Computer Sciences at the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück he stayed there spending two years working as research assistant, before he joined the linked.swissbib.ch project. His research interests are the architecture of distributed services particularly of the semantic web. Nicolas Prongué is research assistant at the University of Applied Sciences HEG Genève. He holds a MSc degree in information science. He is involved in various research projects in Switzerland, in the fields of semantic web, research data and libraries. His main interest is the management and standardisation of library metadata.

Phil Ritchie

Phil Ritchie is Chief Technology Officer at VistaTEC, an indigenous, privately owned Language Services Provider headquartered in Dublin. Phil directs and drives all Language Technology and Research and Development activities. Phil has a Batchelor of Science Degree and 20 years of industry experience at senior management and director levels. Phil is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and an active member of several industry associations. Phil was a founding industrial member of the ADAPT Centre and serves as Chairman of its Industrial Advisory Board. Phil is a partner in the European Commission funded FREME Project. Phil is the lead architect of, and is lead contributor of the Ocelot open source project. Current priority research topics for Phil are Natural Language Parsing, Linked Data and Semantics.

Johann Rolschewski

Johann Rolschewski has been working at the Berlin State Library since 2006. He is in charge of the system support of the Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB) with a main focus on APIs and data formats. Johann has studied Biology at the FU Berlin and has a Master degree in Computer Science from TFH Berlin. He is an active contributor to the Catmandu data toolkit.

Felix Sasaki

Felix Sasaki joined the W3C in 2005 to work in the Internationalization Activity until March 2009. In 2012 he rejoined the W3C team as a fellow on behalf of DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence). He was co-chair of the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group and co-editor of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 specification. He is currently engaged in the LIDER and FREME projects. His main field of interest is the application of Web technologies for representation and processing of multilingual information.

Philip Evan Schreur

Philip Schreur is currently the Assistant University Librarian for Technical and Access Services at Stanford University. He earned a PhD from Stanford in Medieval music theory and an MLIS from the University of California, Berkeley. Philip has been the Chair of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging and deeply involved in the implementation of the new cataloging rules Resource, Description and Access (RDA) in the United States. With a mid-career move to HighWire Press, he developed an interest in the automated taxonomic analysis of digital texts. Currently, he is in charge of coordinating linked-data project development for the Stanford University Libraries (SUL). Initial areas of interest include the use of linked data as a mechanism for identity management across traditional resources and those within the digital library, the integration of linked data from disparate sources, and the transition of traditional technical services workflows to processes rooted in linked open data.

Fabian Steeg

Fabian is a software developer in the LOD group at Hochschulbibliothekszentrum NRW (hbz), where he is working towards an open library infrastructure since 2012. He's been working as a programmer since 2003, with a focus on open source software development and information systems, building open library technology for digitization, preservation, and search. He graduated from the University of Cologne in 2008 with an M.A. in information processing, linguistics, and geography.

Osma Suominen

Osma Suominen is working as an information systems specialist at the National Library of Finland. His current activities are centered around the publishing of bibliographic data, including the Finnish national bibliography Fennica, as Linked Data. He is also one of the creators of the Finto.fi thesaurus and ontology service and is leading development of the Skosmos vocabulary browser used in Finto. Osma Suominen earned his doctoral degree at Aalto University while doing research on semantic portals and quality of controlled vocabularies within the FinnONTO series of projects. His past accomplishments include the Skosify vocabulary analysis and quality improvement tool, and data.aalto.fi, the Linked Data service of Aalto University.

Jörg Waitelonis

Jörg Waitelonis is a founder and CEO of yovisto GmbH, which develops semantic technologies for media. After graduating in computer science at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena in 2006 he focused on the development of video search engines with content analysis technologies. Jörg is also researcher at the Hasso Plattner-Institute for IT-Systems Engineering (HPI) at the University of Potsdam. His main research interests are on the application of Linked Data technologies to improve Information Retrieval systems. This includes semantic annotation, semantic search, as well as recommender systems in the area of digital multimedia archives and libraries. Furthermore, Jörg is one of the core developers and maintainers of the TIB|AV-Portal.

Simeon Warner

Simeon Warner is Director of the Repositories Group at Cornell University Library, and a director of ORCID. Current projects include Linked Data for Libraries, IIIF, the Cornell University Library Archival Repository, the arXiv e-print archive, and Project Euclid. He was one of the developers of arXiv and his research interests include web information systems, interoperability, plagiarism detection, and open-access scholarly publishing. He has been actively involved with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) since its inception and was one of the authors of the OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, ResourceSync and IIIF specifications.

Andromeda Yelton

Andromeda Yelton (http://andromedayelton.com) is a self-employed librarian and software developer who's passionate about promoting coding, collaboration, and diversity in library technology. As a freelance software developer, she writes code for the Wikimedia Foundation, bespoke knitting patterns (http://customfit.makewearlove.com) and library space usage analytics (http://measurethefuture.net/), among other things. In the past, she’s done library outreach, software, and communications at the ebook startup Unglue.it; taught Latin to middle school boys; and been a member of the Ada Initiative advisory board. She has a BS in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, an MA in Classics from Tufts, and an MLS from Simmons. She’s a 2010 LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing awardee, a 2011 ALA Emerging Leader, and a 2013 Library Journal Mover & Shaker; and a past listener contestant on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. She is President-Elect of the Library & Information Technology Association.

 

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