Dr. H. Holger Rath, Business Segment Manager "Knowledge Management", empolis Content Management GmbH

H. Holger Rath is Business Segment Manager "Knowledge Management" at empolis Content Management GmbH (formerly known as STEP Electronic Publishing Solutions GmbH) providing premium products and services in content management and knowledge management. He started at STEP in 1996 as senior consultant and project manager and headed the consulting department from 1998-2000. Holger represents Germany in the ISO standards committee which is responsible for SGML, DSSSL, HyTime, and Topic Maps. Numerous national and international presentations and publications as well as more than ten years experience in information re-engineering prove his competence.

Daniel Rivers-Moore, Director of New Technologies, RivCom

Daniel Rivers-Moore is Director of New Technologies at RivCom, a consultancy and services company specializing in helping businesses adopt XML technologies to meet their information management and distribution needs. He has been actively involved in the development of the XML family of standards, having been a member of the original XML Special Interest Group, joint project leader of the STEP/SGML harmonization initiative under ISO, and software development lead in the recently completed European XML/EDI Pilot Project. In April 1997, at the WWW6 conference in Santa Clara, he gave the world's first public demonstration of XML content being displayed within an industry-standard browser (using a browser plugin developed by RivCom). In addition to giving numerous XML seminars and tutorials for corporate customers such as Shell, Unilever, BNFL and Foster Wheeler Energy, his teaching experience includes several years as a professional trainer giving voice and theater workshops. Recent tutorials include a one-day introduction to XML for the British Computer Society's Object Oriented Programming Specialist Interest Group, and the introductory Keynote/Tutorial at a strategy planning meeting on XML adoption at the NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency in The Hague.

Joel Sachs, Researcher, Goddard Earth Science and Technology Center

Joel Sachs, Researcher, Goddard Earth Science and Technology Center. Joel is designing a semantic web architecture to enable the interoperation of NASA satellite data with environmental law databases. He is also investigating the general use of ontology based knowledge markup to support content based queries, and as a framework for datamining. Joel has been involved in several past datamining projects, both NASA and commercial. In 1997, with IBM France, he was amongst the first to successfully apply modern datamining techniques to e-commerce server logs. Joel has a masters degree in mathematics from Syracuse University, and is pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at UMBC.

Reid Smith, Vice President Knowledge Management, Schlumberger

Reid Smith is vice president, knowledge management, at Schlumberger. He is responsible for leading the effort to improve organizational performance through processes and technology to capture, share, and apply the overall experience and know-how of people in the company. Smith has worked for Schlumberger since 1981 in a variety of positions in the United States and the United Kingdom. He received his Ph.D. (1979) in electrical engineering from Stanford University for his work on distributed problem solving. He also holds a B.Eng. (1968) and an M.Eng. (1969), both from Carleton University.

Stefan Smolnik, Research Assistant, University of Paderborn

Stefan Smolnik – was born in 1970. He received his computer science diploma from the University of Paderborn in 1998 and is currently both a PhD student and research assistant at the Business Computing Department of the Faculty of Business Management, Business Computing and Economics at the University of Paderborn in Germany.

Dan Z. Sokol, President, Cohesia Corporation

Mr. Sokol has managed over thirty computer integration projects in the aerospace, automotive, and metals industries, including research on behalf of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Science Foundation. He has previously published papers on using SGML for concurrent engineering. Mr. Sokol holds a BS in Industrial Engineering and a BS in Computer Science from the Ohio State University. He received his MBA from the University of Dayton.

John Sowa, Independant Consultant

John F. Sowa spent thirty years working on research and development projects at IBM, and another seven years teaching, writing, and consulting. He has a BS degree in mathematics from MIT, an MA in applied mathematics from Harvard, and a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and he has participated in ANSI and ISO standards projects for conceptual schemas, knowledge sharing, and ontology. In conjunction with those projects, he edited the proposed standard for conceptual graphs, which is based on the notation used in many of his publications.

Carsten Tautz, Manager Research & Consulting, empolis Knowledge Management Division, Bertelsmann Mohn Media Group

Carsten Tautz has a strong background in Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Management. After receiving his diploma in Computer Science at the University of Kaiserslautern in 1993, Carsten Tautz joined the Software Technology Transfer Initiative Kaiserslautern (STTI-KL) where he was responsible for structuring technology packages in general and the buildup and maintenance of a technology package on Experience Factories (a concept for reuse of all kinds of software knowledge) in particular. In 1996 the STTI-KL became the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (Fraunhofer IESE). As a researcher at Fraunhofer IESE, Carsten focused further on the application of AI and KM in the field of Software Engineering, which is exemplary for knowledge intensive processes. He developed a technical support platform for the Experience Factory concept. He introduced this platform, which uses case-based reasoning to find similar experiences from past projects, and established Experience Factories (especially for the area of lessons learned) in several organizations including Allianz, the biggest German insurance business, and a large German aerospace company, and Fraunhofer IESE itself. He recently received his Ph.D. on the topic of "Customizing Software Engineering Experience Management Systems to Organizational Needs". Since January 2001, Carsten Tautz is working for the empolis Knowledge Management Division, where he manages strategic KM projects.

David Turner, XML Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation

David Turner is the Product Manager and Technical Evangelist for XML technologies at Microsoft. He is responsible for promoting adoption of XML within the development community. Before working at Microsoft, David was responsible for shipping SGML and HTML authoring products and Internet development tools. He has been working with XML and structured information for over seven years. He is currently Microsoft's representative to the W3C Advisory Committee and is also Microsoft's representative to OASIS. David has a degree in Engineering Science from the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

Bernard Vatant, Knowledge Representation Consultant, Mondeca

Bernard Vatant is a former high school mathematics teacher, graduate from ENSET (Cachan, France) in 1975, and presently working as an independent consultant. He's been recently involved in the development of ontologies for Mondeca Topic Navigator applications, and is Invited Guest in XTM Authoring Group. He has a 20 years long background in astronomy and epistemology popularization, of which most recent episode is the management of a multidimensional website focused on solar astronomy, sustainable development and knowledge representation - www.universimmedia.com. His main present research interests are collective knowledge building and representation, and web indexing ; his experience as a former editor in Open Directory Project has led him to envision further alternative non-hierarchical tools grounded in the Topic Maps paradigm. In everyday life, Bernard is managing complexity with his wife and (up to) 5 children, in French Southern Alps.

Diane Vizine-Goetz, Senior Research Scientist, Office of Research, OCLC

Diane joined OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), a nonprofit, library service and research organization (www.oclc.org), in 1983 as post-doctoral fellow to continue research on automated database quality she began as a doctoral student. While at OCLC, she has conducted research on information organization using controlled vocabularies and classification schemes. She is a member of the knowledge organization (KO) research team, which developed a Web-based version of the Dewey Decimal Classification system. The KO research team is currently investigating techniques for automatically associating subject access systems such as thesauri, term lists and classification schemes for use in metadata creation tools and to support browsing and searching across databases that employ different KO schemes (staff.oclc.org/~vizine/).

Eric van der Vlist, CEO, Dyomedea

Eric van der Vlist is a consultant, a trainer and a contributing editor for xmlhack (http://xmlhack.com) and XML.com (http://xml.com). He has created and maintains (http://xmlfr.org), a French portal dedicated to XML and 4xt (http://4xt.org), a resource site for XT users. Eric is a seasoned software engineer, co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification and active contributor to XML and XSL mailing lists. He has an engineer degree (B.Sc..) from the Ecole Centrale de Paris He has been a contributor for XML 2000 (Style Free Stylesheets), Forum XML 2000 and the European Commission Semantic Web Technologies Workshop.

Dr. Joseph Williamson, Vice President Knowledge Services, EDS-Federal

Dr. Joseph Williamson is the Vice President, Knowledge Services, EDS Federal. He is responsible for the strategy and oversight of EDS Federal Government's Knowledge Management Practice. His knowledge and 22 years of information technology experience bridges Public and Private sector markets; as a result, he is a sought after international leader in the alignment of technology with business success. Dr. Williamson personally contributed to the establishment of clients knowledge management and clients' CIO environments. He has consulted to the US and Foreign Governments and is an international speaker on Knowledge Management. Dr. Williamson joined EDS Federal in 1994 as a Chief Engineer and Deputy Program Manager and has held the positions of Chief Information Officer and of Senior Program Manager. In this role, he personally led teams in the establishment and chartering the Office of the CIO for two different clients to include: the establishment of of a governance program.; Information Policy Boards; Strategic Plans; and enterprise architectures. Prior to joining EDS, Dr. Williamson was the Program Manager for the development, test, and fielding of E-Systems Adaptive Mission Planning Systems for the remotely controlled surveillance and reconnaissance business area. In 1994, the Department of Transportation selected Dr. Williamson, as a nationally recognized expert for the evaluation of a National Information Architecture for the Intelligent Transportation System. In this same time period he was appointed as the U.S. expert to the International Standards Organization's Technical Committee on Transport Information and Control Systems. Dr. Williamson was an author of IEEE 802.10, Standard for Interoperable Local Area Network Security (SILS). In 1999, he founded and continues to chair the Object Management Group's Knowledge Management Working Group.

Ann Wrightson, Consultant, Ontopia AS

Ann Wrightson is a recognized expert on Topic Map usecases, and is an experienced conference speaker. In recent years, she has had lecturing and practical experience in Web development, OOAD, XML technology, Systems integration and Knowledge Representation. Ann started her career in electronic publishing, then moved into academic life, teaching and researching in formal methods, requirements engineering, information systems analysis, safety-critical interactive technical publications, and multimedia applications design. More recently, she returned to publishing, as a technical architect for Sweet & Maxwell Ltd., a leading UK print and online legal publisher; during this time she was an invited expert on the XML Topic Maps authoring group. Ann now works as a consultant for Ontopia AS, a leading provider of Topic Map technology and solutions.

Al Zollar, President and CEO, Lotus Development Corporation, a division of IBM Corp.

Al Zollar is President and CEO of Lotus Development Corp., an IBM company and the undisputed industry leader in messaging, collaboration and Knowledge Management frameworks. These solutions enable corporations and institutions of all sizes to create modern and effective organizational concepts, based on Internet technologies. Previously, Al had been general manager of IBM's Network Computing Software Division, responsible for orchestrating IBM's push to design, develop and deliver leading internet infrastructure middleware for e-business. He is a member of IBM's Worldwide Management Council. During his 23-year career at IBM, Al served as general manager, IBM eNetwork software, senior vice president of development for IBM's Tivoli Systems unit, and has held key management positions in IBM software development laboratories, including Raleigh and Santa Teresa. He joined IBM in 1977 as a systems engineer trainee in San Francisco, California.

Norman Zimmer, Business Development Manager, Knowledge Management Division, empolis NA, Inc.

Norman has worked in the field of systems analysis, database administration and knowledge management for 13 years. His previous roles include programmer/analyst at Unitronix Corporation - a software company specializing in Manufacturing Administration and MRPII software, database administration and web technology integrator at Mercedes-Benz Client Assistance Center, Research Scientist at DaimlerChrysler Research and Technology NA, Technical Specialist for the Mercedes-Benz Internet Strategy Group concentrating on client self-service.

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