Speakers
Fabien Amarger
Fabien Amarger is a doctor/engineer in Computer Science, specialized in Semantic Web technologies. He defended his PhD in 2015 with the main idea to merge non-ontological sources into a knowledge-base-based one regarding the trust given on each source. He has now been working at the Logilab company for several years. Logilab is a French company specialized in application development, free software, Python, Linked Open Data and Semantic Web technologies. At Logilab he has worked on the CapData Opéra project since the beginning as a Semantic Web specialist and developer team.
Kolja Bailly
Kolja Bailly completed his studies in Computer Science at the TU Berlin in 2009. After many years as an entrepreneur and business owner in the field of machine learning, he is currently working as a full-stack software developer in the Open Science Lab of the TIB Hannover in the NFDI4Culture area at the annotation and terminology service Antelope. His areas of work and interests include artificial intelligence, data science, the Semantic Web, information modeling, cataloging, and wiki technologies.
Pierre Beauguitte 
Pierre works as a software engineer at the National Library of Norway, where he is part of a team responsible for developing solutions for inflow and cataloguing of text material, both physical and digital. He completed his Master’s degree at Ircam (Paris, France) in 2011 and received his PhD in music information retrieval from Technological University Dublin, Ireland, in 2019.
Ee Min Hoon
Ee Min Hoon is a Senior Librarian at the National Library Board (Singapore) with over 15 years of experience in the education and library sectors. Her focus area is in the innovative use of metadata for Linked Data and Schema.org Structured Data.
Nuno Freire
Nuno Freire holds a PhD in Informatics and Computer Engineering from the University of Lisbon. His main domain of interest is cultural heritage, and works at the Europeana R&D, with interests in data analysis, data quality, data modelling, novel methods for data aggregation, and interoperability of information systems.
Andrea Gazzarini
Andrea Gazzarini is a curious software engineer mainly focused on Java technology. He intensely loves coding and likes to be considered a developer. Andrea has over 15 years of experience in various software engineering areas, from telecommunications to banking. He has worked for several medium- and large-scale companies, such as IBM and Orga Systems. In 2009, Andrea entered the beautiful world of open-source projects and became a committer for the Apache Qpid project. In 2010, he began his adventure in information retrieval. Since then, he has been involved as a search engineer for many projects in different fields (bibliography, e-government, e-commerce, geospatial search). In 2015, he wrote “Apache Solr Essentials” published by Packt Publishing. Currently, he is the lead architect of the Share-VDE initiative.
Lukas Geist
Lukas Geist is a research software engineer at ZB MED, holding a B.Sc. in Computer Science. Since 2021, Lukas has contributed to diverse projects at ZB MED, spanning web development and data science, beginning as a student assistant. In 2022, Lukas took over the lead in developing the web-based MeSH translation interface.
Shawn Goodwin
Shawn has an academic background in ancient history and languages studying Sumerian and Akkadian at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He applied this knowledge of the study of languages and religion at Atla as a metadata analyst. At Atla, he learned how to create scripts to automate the cleaning of linked data for the Atla Religion Database. His love for RDF led him to work with a consulting company who used OWL, SHACL, and other Semantic Web tools to organize and simplify data for large corporations. He is eagerly applying this experience in Library data, the Semantic Web, and automation to help establish UChicagoNode as a hub for digital humanities projects at the University of Chicago.
Lazaros Ioannidis
Lazaros Ioannidis, born in Thessaloniki, holds a degree in Informatics from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (A.U.Th.), graduating with honors in 2008. He later earned a Master’s in Internet Science and is currently pursuing a PhD at the International Hellenic University. Since 2011, he has worked as a research associate at A.U.Th., contributing to European and domestic projects, mainly in Semantic Web applications. He collaborates with the Open Knowledge Foundation on open-source projects and has been involved in the National Library’s Open Cataloging Data initiative. Lazaros teaches Informatics in Primary Education and at the International Hellenic University. His research includes published articles, conference presentations, and book chapters.
Denny Vrandečić
Denny Vrandečić is the founder of Wikidata and co-creator of Semantic MediaWiki. He is Head of Special Projects at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he is working on Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia. Previously he worked at Google on the Google Knowledge Graph. He was a community-elected member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. He was a visiting researcher at the Laboratory of Applied Ontologies at the CNR, Rome, the ISI Information Sciences Institute, USC University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and at the University of Berkeley, California. Denny has written more than a hundred scientific publications which garnered more than 10,000 citations. Denny holds a PhD from the KIT – Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Denny received the KGC Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. He recently moved to Stuttgart, Germany, from Berkeley, CA.
David M. Weigl
David M. Weigl conducts research at the intersection of music informatics, information studies, digital musicology, and Web science. He earned his PhD from McGill’s School of Information Studies, collaborating with computer scientists, cognitive psychologists, and musicologists at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology. As a postdoc at the University of Oxford, he applied Linked Data approaches to music information across modalities such as symbolic music encodings, audiovisual recordings, and concert ephemera, addressing industry and scholarly perspectives, and investigating user behaviors and information needs in large-scale digital libraries. At the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, he leads Signature Sound Vienna, an interdisciplinary investigation of Vienna’s New Year’s Concert series, and collaborates on E-LAUTE, an international project creating an Electronic Linked Annotated Unified Tablature Edition of German lute tablatures.
Junghae Lee
Junghae Lee is an electronic resources metadata librarian and interim Co-Head of the Metadata and Cataloging Initiatives Unit at the University of Washington Libraries. She completed a C.A.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and holds an M.L.S. in Library and Information Science from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her current research interests include metadata quality, cataloging and discovery, and Linked Data implementation.
Mona Lehtinen
As an information specialist at the National Library of Finland, Mona Lehtinen works mainly with automated subject indexing. Her responsibilities encompass e.g. project coordination, fostering community engagement, building corpora, and testing the latest features of the automatic indexing tool Annif.
Anna-Lena Lorenz
Anna-Lena Lorenz is the Community Manager of the Open Research Knowledge Graph. After her PhD in Physics she started working at TIB in 2022 in the project NFDI4DataScience, where she is involved in training and outreach efforts.
Sanjin Muftić
Sanjin Muftić is a Bosnian-born Canadian digital scholar and film editor based in Cape Town. He is currently working for UCT Libraries as a digital scholarship specialist. His tasks include implementing and maintaining the university digital collections site [Ibali] (https://ibali.uct.ac.za) which is powered by Omeka S, developing advocacy towards practicing research data management, and helping researchers curate and showcase their digital scholarship projects and collections. He has presented at international conferences of the Federation for Theatre Research, the Society for Intermedial Studies, Open Repositories and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. His written contributions include articles in the South African Theatre Journal and Resources for African Indigenous Languages as well as chapters in several books. As a side-hustle, he has also directed and designed videography for numerous theatrical productions, while also having edited two feature films including Barakat. He completed his theatre PhD at UCT focusing on the Planetary, Bricolage and Theatrical Images.
Andreas Orphanides
Andreas Orphanides is the Lead Librarian for UX Strategy at the NC State University Libraries. His work focuses on providing strategic guidance on user experience to the Libraries, and on developing high-quality, human-centered systems to support teaching, learning, and information discovery. Dre’s professional interests include human factors, systems analysis, and information architecture. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from Oberlin College, a Master of Science in Library Science from UNC-Chapel Hill, and a Master of Computer Science from NC State University.
Helena Simões Patrício
Helena Simões Patrício works as librarian at the National Library of Portugal (NLP) and is a research assistant in ISTAR – Information Sciences, Technologies and Architecture Research Centre, at ISCTE-IUL. She served as Director of Information Systems (2007–2012) and Director of Special Collections (2012–2024) at the NLP, in charge of the National Digital Library and leading the management of several national and European digitisation and metadata projects. She graduated in Law (1996), did a post-graduation in Library and Information Science (1998) and concluded a Master in Information Studies and Digital Libraries (2004) with the thesis “Comparative analysis of the relational model and the RDF applied to the conceptual modelling of legislative information”. She is currently a PhD student at ISCTE-IUL, researching in the field of Semantic Web and Linked Open Data.
Cypress Payne
Cypress Payne (she/her) will be graduating in December 2024 from the Master of Library and Information Science program at University of Washington-Seattle, and also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. She works as a library Linked Data metadata student specialist at the University of Washington Libraries, contributing to mapping MARC21 to LRM/RDA/RDF among other Linked Data projects including the RDA/RDF metadata application profiles and the University of Washington Libraries Semantic Web Data. Within the MARC21 to RDA mapping project, Cypress is a mapping contributor and the lead conversion contributor writing the XSLT transformation code.
Adrian Pohl
Adrian (@acka47@openbiblio.social) has been working at the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre (hbz) in Cologne, Germany, since 2008. He is leading the Metadata Infrastructure team whose work focuses on open standards, tools and processes for the publication of structured data on the web. Often collaborating with others, the Metadata Infrastructure team works on a wide range of standards, services and tools, amongst others: lobid, OER Search Index (OERSI), SkoHub, Metafacture, NWBib.
Adrian has been an organizer of SWIB and chair of the programme committee since 2011.
Linda Samsinger
Linda Samsinger was appointed data librarian at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich in 2022. Originally from Zurich, she holds an M.Sc. in Data Science from the University of Zurich (English), specializing in machine learning, an LL.M. in Political Science from Tsinghua University (Mandarin) and a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Geneva (French). She creates and completes projects that foster the field of the digital humanities, aid academic researchers with resource recovery and transform (meta)data into context-compliant formats. Her approach integrates data-driven tools and technology with a uniquely human-centered edge. Her areas of interest are theoretical and transdisciplinary, encompassing literature, languages, art, psychology, politics, law and history, as well as information science, data analytics, programming and statistics.
Christoph Steindl
Christoph Steindl works at the Austrian National Library in the Department for Research and Dataservices. He is involved in technical support and conception in the area of Digital Humanities at the ÖNB, which includes, among other things, the Sustainable Infrastructure for Digital Editions and the ÖNB Labs. His research interests are in the fields of data modeling and data provision, with a strong focus on GLAM institutions. Most recently, he worked on the implementation of the digital edition projects Wenzelsbibel Digital, Peter Handke Notizbücher and E-LAUTE, e.g. in the development of a modeling concept in TEI. He studied media informatics at the University of Vienna and worked there as a software developer and in the area of system administration.
Osma Suominen
Osma Suominen is working as an information systems specialist at the National Library of Finland. He is currently working on automated subject indexing, in particular the Annif tool and the Finto AI service, as well as the publishing of bibliographic data 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.
Nishad Thalhath
Nishad Thalhath is a researcher at the Laboratory for Large-Scale Biomedical Data Technology at the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, Japan. In this role, he is responsible for developing and managing the integration and curation systems for omics (meta)data. He is also a member of the Metadata Laboratory at the School of Library, Media, and Information Studies, University of Tsukuba, Japan. His research interests include metadata standards, knowledge graphs, and metadata interoperability. With nearly two decades of experience, Nishad has contributed to various projects as a developer, engineer, and consultant. Nishad is a Dublin Core Usage board member and maintains the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative’s online resources.
Jakob Voß
Jakob Voß works in research and development at the head office of the Common Library Network (Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund, GBV) in Göttingen. His main interests include data modeling, interoperability and knowledge organization.
Shuai Wang
Shuai Wang is a scientific engineer in the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He studied Computer Science in Manchester, Paris and Amsterdam. The past few years, his research has included Semantic Web and Linked Data. His submission is built on top of the Master’s thesis of Maria Adamidou, a Master student he co-supervised.
Crystal Yragui
Crystal Yragui (she/her/hers) is a metadata librarian and interim Co-Head of the Metadata and Cataloging Initiatives Unit at the University of Washington Libraries. Crystal manages the MARC21 Bibliographic to LRM/RDA/RDF Mapping and Conversion Project. Crystal’s day-to-day work at the UW Libraries focuses on Linked Data, identity management, cataloging in MARC and non-MARC formats, and MARС and non-MARC metadata management. She serves as a co-chair of the PCC Identity Management Advisory Committee (IMAC) and the ALA Core MARC Formats Transition Interest Group. She earned an M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Washington in 2014.
Sofia Zapounidou
Sofia Zapounidou is a metadata specialist at the National Library of Greece (NLG). Her main duties involve the transition from MARC21 to the official RDA and Linked Data. She creates application profiles, selects (or creates) value vocabularies, maps MARC21 to RDA/RDF, and reviews the quality of NLG data. She serves as the principal author of the NLG guidelines (in Greek) for the implementation of the official RDA. She has served as member in the LIBER Linked Open Data Working Group. She is a member of the IFLA Cataloguing Section, the IFLA Bibliographic Conceptual Models Review Group, and the RDA Examples Working Group. She additionally volunteers as a mapping contributor for the University of Washington’s MARC21 to LRM/RDA/RDF mapping project. She holds a BA in Archives and Library Science, a MSc in Information Systems, and a PhD in Library Linked Data with a focus on library conceptual models.