Dianne Kennedy, Chief Technical Consultant, IDEAlliance

Dianne Kennedy is an information technologies consultant who plays a major role in helping the industry adopt and implement new technology standards. She was chairperson of the XML 98 - 2000 Internet Conference, serves as Chief Technical Consultant for IDEAlliance and will be chairperson for the new Knowledge Technologies Conference. She has been CEO of her own consulting firm since 1993. Formerly Ms. Kennedy served as VP of Marketing and Business Development for Active Systems, Inc. during its startup phase and Director of Business Development for Datalogics, Inc. Currently Ms. Kennedy is the Chief Strategy Officer for InfoLoom, Inc. a provider of Topic Maps software and services.

W. Eliot Kimber, Lead Brain, DataChannel, Inc.

W. Eliot Kimber has a made a career out of finding generalized solutions to hard information management problems, first at IBM and later as a systems integration consultant focusing on standards-based information management systems. Eliot is a founding member (retired) of the XML Working Group, a coeditor of the HyTime and Standard Music Description Language standards, and frustrated almost author of a book on HyTime. Eliot is currently pursuing the implementation of the all-singing, all-dancing standards-based information management system he could never get any vendor to build. When not bridging the gap from pure abstraction to practical implementation, Eliot is a devoted husband and dog owner. He enjoys biking, horse-back riding, bodyboarding, and snowboarding (albeit infrequently).

Sam Knox, Director of Analyst Services, Inxight Software

Sam Knox is the director of analyst services at Inxight Software, a leading provider of information access and content analysis software solutions. As part of the professional services team, Sam has responsibility for working with clients to specify and build function-specific portals using the Inxight portal platform. Sam leads the team that analyzes user requirements and content sets, develops taxonomies, and design user interfaces. Prior to joining Inxight, he was a founder of Stratesphere, a developer of vertically oriented portals, and director of research at Harbor Research, Inc. Prior to joining Harbor, he served as product manager at Webhire, Inc. Sam has an MBA from Yale and a BA from NYU.

David Koepsell, Business Web Ontologist, Bowstreet

In addition to his work at Bowstreet, Koepsell is an adjunct assistant professor for the department of philosophy for the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo, and the executive director of the center for commercial ontology in Buffalo, N.Y. David has taught at SUNY Buffalo since 1997. Koepsell also practiced law for five years, serving as an attorney for the law firms of Cohen & Lombardo and Altreuter & Habermehl, both of New York. He specialized in negligence and copyright litigation.

Benedicte Le Grand, PhD Student, Laboratoire d Informatique de Paris 6

Benedicte Le Grand was born in 1975. She received her engineer diploma from the Institute National des Telecommunications in 1997 and is currently a PhD student at LIP6 (Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6). Her research deals with Virtual Reality and its use for complex systems visualization. She has been working on XML for several years and she is particularly interested in topic maps; Benedicte was a speaker at ACM CIKM'99 (Conference on Information and Knowledge Management) in Kansas City, at Markup Technologies'99 in Philadelphia and at XML Europe 2000 in Paris. She recently presented her work in Washington. She is a founding member of TopicMaps.Org.

Douglas B. Lenat, President and CEO, Cycorp, Inc.

Doug is one of the world's leading computer scientists, and is both the founder of the CYC® project and the president of Cycorp, Inc. He has been a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University and Stanford University. He is a prolific author, whose hundreds of publications include the books: Knowledge Based Systems in Artificial Intelligence (1982, McGraw-Hill), Building Expert Systems (1983, Addison-Wesley), Knowledge Representation (1988, Addison-Wesley), Building Large Knowledge Based Systems (1989, Addison-Wesley). His 1976 Stanford thesis earned him the bi-annual IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1977. He was one of the original Fellows of the AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence).

James Mason, Chairman, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34

James D. Mason, originally trained as a mediaevalist and linguist, has been a writer, systems developer, and manufacturing engineer at U.S. Department of Energy facilities in Oak Ridge since the late 1970s. In 1981, he joined the ISO's work on standards for document management and interchange. He has chaired ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 (and its prececessor committees), which is responsible for SGML, DSSSL, Topic Maps, and related standards, since 1985. Dr. Mason has been a frequent writer and speaker on standards and their applications. For his work on SGML, Dr. Mason has received the Gutenberg Award from Printing Industries of America and the Tekkie Award from GCA.

Bain McKay, Chief Scientist and Executive Vice President, CIRI Lab Inc.

Mr. McKay has a broad experience in the computing industry, from being a database expert in the early 70s in the days of Timesharing Service Bureaus, which he compares to todays ISP industry, to IT manager at Telesat Canada who are responsible for Canada s Communications Satellites. Afterwards, he became an End User Product Development Manager, Artificial Intelligence Research Manager and International 3rd Party Channel Marketing Manager at Cognos Corporation from 1984 - 1993. In '93 he left Cognos to pursue his dream of building an intelligent product to increase corporate productivity by focusing on the learning process. After 8 years of heavy research, the last 7 through CIRI Lab, the results of his long focused efforts are now being realized through leading-edge knowledge management product technology provided to OEMs.

Derek Millar, Director, Professional Services, NewBook Production, Inc.

Derek is Director of Professional Services at NewBook Production Inc., a management and technical consulting company specializing in the field of electronic publishing systems involving SGML and XML. He has many years of experience providing consulting services and technical expertise to companies implementing solutions for publishing and document management. He has helped develop solutions for issues relating to data creation and maintenance in the aerospace, legal publishing and reference publishing industries.

Chuck Myers, Senior Manager, Business Development, ePaper Solutions Group, Adobe Systems, Inc.

As Senior Manager of Business Development, ePaper Solutions Group for Adobe Systems, Mr. Myers is responsible for the strategic technology direction for the ePaper Solutions Group, which is responsible for Adobe's Acrobat and eBook products and standards participation. Mr. Myers has more than 25 years of experience in the computer software and publishing industries at Datalogics, Frame, and Datalogics. He was responsible for Datalogics PAGER publishing product and a number of early SGML and database publishing systems.

Steven R. Newcomb, CoolHeads Consulting

Steven R. Newcomb is an independent consultant in information management. He is a co-editor of the ISO HyTime standard. Developer of the GroveMinder technology. Founding Chairman, Conventions for the Application of HyTime (CApH) activity of the Graphic Communications Association Research Institute (now IDEAlliance), the original developer of the Topic Map paradigm, and co-editor of ISO/IEC 13250:2000, the Topic Maps information architecture. Founding Co-chair, TopicMaps.Org. Founding Conference Chair, Extreme Markup Languages Conferences.

Jim Nisbet, Senior VP of Technology, Semio Corporation

Mr. Jim Nisbet is the Senior Vice President of Engineering of Semio Corporation. Before joining Semio Mr. Nisbet was the founder and chief technology officer of DataTools, Inc., a database software tool company founded in 1991 and acquired by BMC Software in 1997. Prior to DataTools, Mr. Nisbet worked at Stanford University at the Center for Information Technology for over 15 years. During that time he worked on a wide variety of software development projects including the development of operating system, teleprocessing and database systems on mainframe and distributed systems. Mr. Nisbet has also worked as a software consultant for the Rand Corporation as well as for several startup companies.

Chimezie Thomas-Ogbuji, Consultant, Fourthought, Inc.

Chimezie Thomas-Ogbuji is a 24 year old employee of Fourthought Inc. He joined Fourthought Inc. in March 24th, 2000 and has been heavily involved in their development of 4Suite, a complete set of XML processing tools, and 4Suite Server. He's worked on several implementations for clients that build on these tools (4RDF, 4XSLT, and 4DOM) and has published several articles on these tools and on XML technologies in general.

Uche Ogbuji, Principal Consultant, Fourthought, Inc.

Uche Ogbuji is a Computer Engineer, co-founder and CEO of Fourthought, Inc., a software vendor and consultancy specializing in open, standards-based XML solutions, especially as applicable to problems of knowledge management. He has worked with XML for several years, co-developing 4Suite, a library of open-source tools for XML development and object database management in Python. He also co-develops 4Suite Server, an XML data server using 4Suite to provide a flexible XML processing platform. He writes articles on XML for LinuxWorld, UNIX Insider and IBM Developer's Zone, where he is XML and Web Services columnist. Mr. Ogbuji is a Nigerian immigrant with a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Milwaukee School of Engineering. He currently resides in Boulder, Colorado.

Nikita Ogievetsky, President, CogiTech, Inc.

Nikita Ogievetsky has been a computer consultant since 1994, and has worked with XML since 1997. He maintains http://www.cogx.com: a website devoted to Knowledge Management, XSLT, Topic Maps and XML-driven GUI. He is a member of IDEAlliance Independent Consultants Cooperative and a participating member of the XTM working group. >From 1981 to 1994 Nikita worked in the field of Neutrino Astrophysics for Russian-German and American-Italian collaborations. He has more than fifteen publications on computer science, applied math and physics.

Mike Olson, Co-Founder and CTO, Fourthought, Inc.

Mike Olson is co-founder and CTO of Fourthought, Inc. an IT consulting firm specializing in open-technology and open standards solutions. Mike Olson is the lead developer of Fourthought's open source product 4Suite, an open-source Python implementation of the W3C DOM, XPath, XSLT, XPointer, XLink and RDF specifications, and the ODMG Object Database Specification.

Soelwin Oo, Student Developer, empolis UK

Currently studying Software Engineering at the University of the West Of England. I am on my industrial posting at empolis UK where I am working in the R&D department using the following technologies: X2X - Out of line linking XLink technology developed by empolis. K42 - Java Topic Map engine developed by empolis. XML & NewsML: Currently developing a prototype demonstration of the integration of K42 topic map engine with the topic structures found within the newly published NewsML standard.

Jack Park, Senior Scientist, Advanced Products & Strategies, VerticalNet Solutions

Jack Park is actively involved in projects related to the tools of human collaborative activity. He does this both within VerticalNet, and outside, where he works with a team that is constructing Douglas Engelbart's vision, called an Open Hyperdocument System (http://www.bootstrap.org)

Steve Pepper, Founder & CTO, Ontopia

Steve Pepper is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Ontopia, a company dedicated to the development of high quality topic map software and the provision of consulting and training services. He is a founding member of TopicMaps.Org, an independent consortium of parties that seeks to enhance the applicability of topic mapping to the World Wide Web by leveraging the XML family of specifications, and editor of XTM (the XML Topic Maps specification). Steve represents Norway on JTC 1/SC 34, the ISO committee responsible for the development of SGML and related standards, and is convenor of WG 3 (Information association), whose responsibilities include the HyTime and Topic Map standards. A frequent speaker at SGML, XML, and knowledge managements events around the world, he is the author and maintainer of the "Whirlwind Guide to SGML and XML tools" and co-author (with Charles Goldfarb and Chet Ensign) of the "SGML Buyer's Guide" (Prentice-Hall, 1998).

Ronald Poell, Consultant Knowledge Management, Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research

Ronald Poell studied Geology in Marseille (France). He is professionally active in ICT since 1987. He has been CEO of his own company in France during 8 years and previously worked at Syntegra Groep B.V. as Project Manager and Technical Project Leader. Since Mai 2000 he is employed at TNO as Consultant Knowledge Management. He is the conceptual director of the IKM-I3 program at TNO. He conceived and developed Notion System in the early nineties and the experience with this system form the basics for the semantic network developments within the IKM-I3 program.

Paul Prueitt, Founder, OntologyStream.com

Paul Prueitt has developed a consulting practice that evaluates new generation knowledge technologies and innovations. His approach to the current Knowledge Management space is grounded in basic research on the neuroscience of memory and anticipation, in general systems theory, and the foundations of logic and mathematics. A background of research interactions with leading scholars in neural networks, evolutionary programming, computational linguistics, database theory, and Russian applied semiotics has given this work a unique status. Dr. Prueitt received a PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1988, and worked for three years as a post doc in quantum neurodynamics and physics at Georgetown University. He has designed, prototyped and implemented a moderate number of commercial software systems and is involved in a project to map worldwide emerging intellectual property in several areas of interest.! His publications include work in theoretical immunology, biological and artificial neural networks, knowledge engineering, computational argumentation, decision theory and computer human interface design.