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Dean Allemang Chief Scientist, TopQuadrant Inc., & Co-Author, Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist

Dr. Allemang specializes in innovative applications of knowledge technology and brings to TopQuadrant over 15 years of experience in research, deployment, and development of knowledge-based systems. He developed the curriculum for Top Quadrant's successful training series for Semantic Web technologies, which he has been presenting to customers world-wide for five years. He is co-author of "Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist" (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2008), which is already in second printing and translated into Korean. Dean has worked and studied extensively throughout the US and Europe, completing a master's degree at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall scholar, a PhD at the Ohio State University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Scholar (where he was also awarded the President's 300th Commencement Award), and is a two-time winner of the the Swiss Prize for Innovation in Technology.

Sessions By Dean Allemang

Steve Ardire VP Strategy & Business Development, Early Stage Semantic Technology Startups

For past 15 years provided business strategy, marketing, sales consulting services to numerous early stage software startups mostly in content processing and enterprise information management. Current focus is semantic technology. Steve has BA, Geology Franklin & Marshall College and MBA University of Connecticut. http://www.linkedin.com/in/sardire

Sessions By Steve Ardire

Daniela Barbosa Business Development Manager, Dow Jones Client Solutions, Dow Jones & Company

Daniela Barbosa works with large corporations in deploying information strategies through various parts of the enterprise, including helping them develop and manage their corporate vocabularies.  Connecting business information with vocabulary management solutions, Ms. Barbosa is responsible for delivering end-to-end solutions that help organizations add structure and value to existing information assets and connects users to the information they need, when and where they need it.

Prior to this role, Ms. Barbosa was a solutions architect for Dow Jones Client Solutions and Factiva Consulting Services, before Factiva was acquired by Dow Jones in December 2006. In this role she was responsible for the definition and design of customer solutions that incorporated content from Dow Jones Factiva to enable customers to deliver business intelligence and actionable insight.  She has worked with various Fortune 500 clients in the high-tech, consumer products, consulting, telecommunications, pharmaceutical and financial industries, as well as with many B2C customers in the ecommerce and digital media space.

An avid social media fan and contributor, Ms. Barbosa has participated in various speaking engagements and written on the topic of information delivery in the enterprise. She continually uses social media tools and processes to engage with customers and prospects, and she often shares the results of some of her research work. Most recently, she spearheaded a Folksonomies & Taxonomies round table event in Silicon Valley, California and published an ebook on hybrid approaches to folksonomies and taxonomies in the enterprise.  Some of her thoughts on various topics around information delivery can be found on her blog Unstruc...chichatting about information delivery.

Ms. Barbosa earned her Master's degree in Library and Information Science (MLIS) from the School of Information and Library Science at Rutgers University, New Jersey.

Sessions By Daniela Barbosa

Alex Barnes Senior Architect, Strategic Technology Solutions, Hitachi Consulting

Alex has over 25 years of experience in enterprise architecture, project management, change management, and system development processes and methodologies. Alex has been technical lead on a number of portal and CMS implementations and has led the development of taxonomies and of tools and governance processes to support taxonomy efforts.

Sessions By Alex Barnes

Dr. Denise A.D. Bedford Goodyear Professor of Knowledge Management, Kent State University

Dr. Denise Bedford is currently a Senior Information Officer at the World Bank in Washington DC. At the World Bank she serves as practice lead for Business Architecture, is a core member of the Operational and Knowledge Systems Program and the Enterprise Search team, and is a certified Enterprise Architect. Her responsibilities include development of the Bank’s core metadata and content type strategies, management of ontologies, taxonomies and the World Bank’s multilanguage topic thesaurus, and development and operationalization of the Bank’s semantic analysis technologies. In addition to the World Bank, she has held positions at NASA, Intel Corporation, Stanford University, the American Mathematical Association, the University of California, University of Michigan and University of Southern California. She is adjunct faculty at Georgeotown University, Unversity of Tennessee, and Kent State University where she teaches a variety of courses in information architecture, knowledge management, systems and project management, and semantics/semantic applications. She is a member of several professional associations including ASIST, ACM, AIIM, SLA, ALA and AAAI. Her educational background includes a B.A. in History, Russian Language and Literature, and German Language and Literature; an M.A. in Russian History; an M.S. in Librarianship and a Ph.D. in Information Science. In January, 2010 Dr. Bedford will be retiring from the World Bank to assume the Goodyear Professorship at Kent State University. In this new position she will focus on teaching and research in the areas of knowledge management, architecture and engineering, communities of practice, and semantic web and semantic search applications.

Sessions By Denise A.D. Bedford

Jenny Benevento Information Architect/Taxonomist, Sears Holding Company

Jenny Benevento has built taxonomies for the University of Illinois, the Associated Press, & social media websites through her freelance business. She currently works as a taxonomist for Sears Holding Company. She blogs at www.jennyjenny.org.

Sessions By Jenny Benevento

Joseph A. Busch Senior Principal, Project Performance Corporation, Taxonomy Strategies

Joseph A. Busch is the knowledge leader for taxonomy and metadata and Senior Principal for Information Management at Project Performance Corporation (PPC). Founder and a principal of Taxonomy Strategies. He works with large companies, government agencies, and international organizations in developing metadata frameworks and taxonomy strategies. Before this, he was the founder and a principal of Taxonomy Strategies and held senior positions at Interwoven, Metacode Technologies, the Getty Information Institute, and Pricewaterhouse. Mr. Busch is a past president of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and a former member of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Board of Directors.

Sessions By Joseph A. Busch

Gary Carlson Principal, Gary Carlson Consulting

Gary Carlson brings over 20 years of experience as a taxonomist, consultant, product manager, and information strategist working for small to Fortune 100 companies.  The past twelve years have been spent leading information and knowledge management projects and products spanning Taxonomy Tools, Search, SharePoint 2010, Auto-categorization, Expert systems, Content Management, and Governance.  Gary is currently focussed on helping companies develop their information infrastructure to meet enterprise goals.  He is currently involved in customer facing e-commerce, social media and semantic web technologies.

Sessions By Gary Carlson

Jeff Carr Senior Information Architect & Search Consultant, Earley & Associates

Jeff is a Senior Information Architect and Search Consultant with Earley & Associates specializing in user centered information design. With a strong multi-disciplinary foundation across information architecture, content management, enterprise search, taxonomy, metadata, search marketing and business analysis, he has been involved in the design, development and integration of web-based solutions from intranets and extranets to public facing websites for a variety of large enterprises across a wide range of industries.

Sessions By Jeff Carr

Mr Dave Clarke CEO, Synaptica International

Dave Clarke is CEO of Synaptica International, the worldwide distributor of the Synaptica taxonomy management software application. His previous roles include co-founder and CTO of Synapse Corporation and Global Taxonomy Director at Dow Jones. He is the principal architect of the Synaptica software and the creator of Taxonomy Warehouse. He served on the NISO committee responsible for the 2005 version of the US national standard for controlled vocabularies - ANSI/NISO Z39.19.

Sessions By Dave Clarke

Lisa Dawn Colvin Independent Consultant

Sessions By Lisa Dawn Colvin

Christine JM. Connors Principal, TriviumRLG LLC

Ms. Connors has extensive experience in taxonomy, ontology and metadata design and development. Prior to forming TriviumRLG Ms. Connors was the global director, semantic technology solutions for Dow Jones, responsible for partnering with business champions across Dow Jones to improve digital asset management and delivery. Ms. Connors also served as business champion for the Synaptica® software application and supported Dow Jones consulting practices worldwide. Prior to joining Dow Jones Ms. Connors was  knowledge architect at Intuit, and metadata architect at Raytheon Company. Ms. Connors holds a master of science degree in Library and Information Sciences from Simmons College, Boston, MA.

Sessions By Christine JM. Connors

Michael Crandall Senior Lecturer, Information School, University of Washington Information School

Michael Crandall is Chair of the Master of Science in Information Management program and  Senior Lecturer in the Information School of the University of Washington.  He has served on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Board of Trustees since its inception in 2001, managed the Knowledge Architecture Group in Microsoft Information Services, and worked on information management and information architecture at the Boeing Company.

Sessions By Michael Crandall

Ron Daniel Jr. Disruptive Technologies Director, Elsevier

Ron Daniel, Jr. is a Principal at Taxonomy Strategies. Before becoming a partner at Taxonomy Strategies, Dr. Daniel held technical positions at Interwoven, Metacode and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Dr. Daniel is an expert on XML and metadata industry standards. He has served as chair, editor, or member in numerous working groups including PRISM (Publishers Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) (prismstandard.org), XML Linking, RDF (Resource Description Framework), and the Dublin Core (dublincore.org). He co-edited three RFCs for the Internet Engineering Task Force. Ron earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Oklahoma State University, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge University and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Sessions By Ron Daniel

Seth Earley President, Earley & Associates Inc.

Seth has been implementing content management and knowledge management projects for over 14 years and has been in the technology field for 20 + years. He is founder of the Boston Knowledge Management Forum and co-author of Practical Knowledge Management from the IBM Press. He is former adjunct professor at Northeastern University, where he taught graduate courses in Knowledge Management Infrastructure and E Business Strategy. He was 2009 Co-Chair of the Metadata Committee, NDIIPP Education and Outreach for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). Seth has developed search, content and knowledge strategies for global organizations and has developed underlying taxonomies for a diverse roster of Fortune 1000 companies. He is a popular speaker and workshop leader at conferences throughout North America speaking on intranet design, knowledge management, content management systems and strategy, taxonomy development and other related topics.

Sessions By Seth Earley

Jordan Frank VP, Sales & Business Development, Traction Software

Jordan Frank earned his blog and wiki black belt after joining Traction Software as VP Marketing and Business Development in 2002. Besides living and breathing every day in the company’s internal blog and keeping an external blog at www.tractionsoftware.com, Jordan engages with leading pharmaceutical, US Government and many other organizations to guide implementations and ensure Wiki fast success at customer sites. Jordan previously held program, product and operations management roles at Inktomi and Adero. Jordan earned an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management in 2000 and a BA from Dartmouth in 1994.

 

Sessions By Jordan Frank

Heather Hedden Senior Analyst, Project Performance Corporation

Heather Hedden is a senior analyst providing taxonomy consulting with Project Performance Corporation and is author of The Accidental Taxonomist  (Information Today Inc., 2010). She has developed taxonomies for SharePoint document management at First Wind, for search integration at the software developer Viziant, and for periodical indexing at Gale. She has also worked as a taxonomy consultant and indexer for her own business, Hedden Information Management. Heather teaches online workshops in taxonomy creation through the continuing education program of Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Sessions By Heather Hedden

Carol Hert Consultant and Taxonomist, Professional Services, SchemaLogic Inc.

Carol currently works in Professional Services at SchemaLogic where she helps customers model their taxonomic and structural metadata in SchemaLogic tools.  In addition, she provides advisory services on taxonomy management and conducts training. Prior to joining SchemaLogic, Carol was an independent consultant specializing in metadata system research and design. In this context she developed XML metadata application profiles, taxonomies, and designed and executed a wide variety of research studies designed to inform metadata system design. She has also been on the faculties of both Indiana University and Syracuse University as an assistant professor of information science. She holds an MLS from Columbia University and a PhD in information Transfer from Syracuse University.

Sessions By Carol Hert

Marjorie M.K. Hlava President & Chairman, Access Innovations, Inc., Data Harmony My blog is TaxoDiary

Marjorie Hlava, Chair-SLA-Taxonomy-Division, President-Access-Innovations, www.taxodiary.com blog covers news-trends-opinions in the taxonomy and metadata space, created over 50 thesauri and taxonomies and worked with more than 200. Standards development including Z39.19/2005-Controlled-Vocabulary, Z39.84-Dublin-Core and the NISO-Content-Board for NISO, research areas include productivity-of-content-creation, information-access-governance-layer through automated-indexing, thesaurus-development, taxonomy-creation, natural-language-processing, machine-translations, and knowledge-organization-systems (KOS http ://www.accessinn.com/about_us/Management_team.html

Sessions By Marjorie M.K. Hlava

Rebecca Jones Managing Partner, Dysart & Jones Associates

As a principal with Dysart & Jones, Rebecca focuses on facilitating clients' planning processes, problem-solving, and project management.  These are all skills she honed during eight years with Imperial Oil Limited, where she was involved with many innovative information management and human resource initiatives.  An early advocate of integrating information services into business processes, Rebecca restructured discrete records and information functions into one client-focused service unit.  She also launched and led one of the company's first self-managing teams and directed its computing skills team.  Rebecca is known for having long advocated the application of business savvy to information services and knowledge management.  She teaches professional development courses with the University of Toronto's iSchool Institute.  Her services as facilitator in decision-making and problem-solving processes are enlisted by many organizations and focus groups.

Sessions By Rebecca Jones

Patrick Lambe Founder, Straits Knowledge

Patrick Lambe is the author of the widely-praised book "Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness" (Oxford: 2007). Based in Singapore, he is the founder of knowledge management research and consulting firm Straits Knowledge, two-term past President of the Information and Knowledge Management Society, an Adjunct Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Knowledge Management. Patrick was educated at Oxford, did his Master's in Librarianship and Information Studies at the University of London, and has worked for the past 30 years in librarianship, learning and development, elearning and knowledge management. He is a widely respected keynote speaker and writer on knowledge and information management issues, and his blog is at http://www.greenchameleon.com

Sessions By Patrick Lambe

Mike Lauruhn Principal, Taxonomy Strategies LLC

Sessions By Mike Lauruhn

Stephanie Lemieux Taxonomy Practice Lead, Earley & Associates

Stephanie is the Taxonomy Practice Lead at Earley & Associates, where she has helped clients implement taxonomy and content management across a variety of technologies. Recent projects include the creation of faceted search taxonomies for large e-commerce websites and digital asset management taxonomy to facilitate marketing resource management and reuse. Stephanie has a Masters in Library and Information Studies (MLIS) from McGill University, specializing in knowledge and content management, taxonomy, and information architecture.

 

Sessions By Stephanie Lemieux

Cecil O. Lynch MD,MS Principal and Chief Knowledge Engineer, OntoReason,LLC, Assistant Professor, Medical Informatics,UC Davis School of Medicine

Sessions By Cecil O. Lynch

Gia Lyons Social Business Software Consultant, Strategic Consulting, Jive Software

Gia Lyons has been developing, providing consulting services for, or selling socio-collaborative solutions since 1996. She spent four years as a collaborative application instructor and developer, another eight years with IBM as a socio-collaborative technical specialist and evangelist, serving large organizations in the Americas. Gia joined Jive Software in June 2008 as an evangelist and strategic consultant. She crafts custom-fit Jive Social Business Software adoption implementation strategies for her clients’ employees, partners, and customers. Lately, she's worked with healthcare clients, including insurance providers, medical device manufacturers, hospitals, and clinics. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Organizational Communication from the University of Tulsa.

Sessions By Gia Lyons

Paula R McCoy Manager, Taxonomy Development, ProQuest

Paula McCoy is the manager of Taxonomy Development at ProQuest, a global leader in the provision of specialized information resources and technologies to libraries of all types. She manages the ProQuest Controlled Vocabulary® and specialized authority files used to index databases in fields ranging from business and management to science, technology, and medicine. She has been at ProQuest for 26 years, managing the company's flagship product, ABI/INFORM, and the Accounting & Tax Database. She has several years' experience leading the company's autocategorization effort.

Sessions By Paula R McCoy

Rich Morey Public Health Advisor, Office of Communications, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)

Rich Morey is a Public Health Advisor in SAMHSA's Communications Office, where he manages SAMHSA’s Web program.  He is also Project Manager for the SAMHSA Health Information Network (SHIN) Knowledge Management Project.  Rich is a member of the HHS (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) Web Council, and regularly presents to HHS and SAMHSA program staff on web management and governance. Prior to becoming a Public Health Advisor, Rich was an IT Specialist at the HHS Information Technology Services Center and at the SAMHSA Division of Information Resources Management. Rich has also worked at the National Institute of Mental Health during his 12-year career at HHS. He holds a BA from the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA.

Sessions By Rich Morey

Leslie Owens Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

Sessions By Leslie Owens

Wendi Pohs Chief Technology Officer, InfoClear Consulting

Wendi Pohs is CTO at InfoClear Consulting, a company that specializes in taxonomy management and toolkit integration.  Her clients include a major news media company, a major computer vendor,  several corporate health care clients, and leading consumer Web sites. Previously, she was a consulting IT specialist on IBM's intranet user experience team. Wendi is the author of a book about knowledge management methodologies, Practical Knowledge Management: The Lotus Knowledge Discovery System, published by IBM Press.  Wendi's past experience includes search and taxonomy work at the American Mathematical Society and at Lotus Development Corporation. She received her BA and MILS degrees from the University of Michigan.

Sessions By Wendi Pohs

Tom Reamy Chief Knowledge Architect, KAPS Group

Tom Reamy is currently the Chief Knowledge Architect and founder of KAPS Group, a group of knowledge architecture, taxonomy, and eLearning consultants.

Tom has 20 years of experience in information architecture, intranet management and consulting, and education and training software. 

Tom’s academic background includes a Master’s in the History of Ideas, research in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and a strong background in philosophy, particularly epistemology.  He has published articles in various journals and is a frequent speaker at knowledge management conferences.

When not writing or developing KM projects, he can usually be found at the bottom of the ocean in Carmel taking photos of strange creatures.

Sessions By Tom Reamy

Thomas Vander Wal Principal, InfoCloud Solutions, Inc

 

Thomas Vander Wal is an analyst, strategist, advisor, and popular speaker. He focusses his work on increasing value and optimizing social tools inside, through, and outside the firewall. He works with organizations of all sizes and focus (non-profit and education to Fortune 500) to help them better understand the values and hidden considerations in building, implementing, and optimizing these social tools. He has a broad and deep background covering more than 20 years of experience in project/product/program management, application development, and user experience.

Thomas puts the focus on improving use and reuse of shared information in the services and tools. He deeply understands the tensions and need to focus on: The people using the tools as they need: the difference of collaboration, community, & collective services; and Implementing and maintaining these services on individual as well as across various services and tools. 

Thomas has a strong focus on meta for machine use, but also for people finding information and refinding it. He coined the term "folkonomy" to differentiate the shared terms people apply for their own use as well as others. He also helps develop the integration of folksonomy with taxonomy for the best results.

Thomas helped found the Boxes and Arrows online magazine, helped found the Institute for Information Architecture, and has been a member of the Web Standards Project Steering Committee.

 

Sessions By Thomas Vander Wal

Jay Ven Eman CEO, Access Innovations, Inc.

Jay Ven Eman has been with Access Innovations since late 1978. He has been active in all aspects of its business. He has overseen Access' database production services where he was responsible for the design and conversion of large, legacy databases for a variety of government and commercial organizations. He writes, gives workshops, consults, and helps build large-scale, complex, information rich databases. He has presented papers and workshops at ASIS&T, SLA, ASIDIC, InternetWorld, Online - London, AGSI - Netherlands, and many others. Before joining Access, he worked for the University of New Mexico at the Technology Applications Center, operated under a contract from NASA. He specialized in technology transfer and information dissemination of space technology to the commercial arena. He received his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Sessions By Jay Ven Eman

Dr. Amanda J Vizedom Principal Ontologist, Wind River Consulting, LLC

Dr. Vizedom supports USAF as Technical Lead for the Enterprise Vocabulary Team(EVT). This team provides technical guidance and support for ontology development by and for Communities of Interest across the enterprise, ontology management and harmonization, and support for application of ontologies to enable Semantic SOA, semantic indexing and discovery, interoperability, reuse, authoritativeness, and other elements of the AF's Transparency initiative. Previously, Dr. Vizedom has developed and designed ontology for a range of user communities and technologies, including search, entity extration, and inference-heavy AI applications.  Dr. Vizedom received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Univ. of Minnesota, where her research interests focused especially on social contexts and their consequences for evidential reasoning and belief; she maintains a special interest in cross-community knowledge development, representation, and sharing, all with an eye to better enabling end-user knowledge access, reasoning and decision-making.

Sessions By Amanda J Vizedom

Ms Annie Wang Senior Manager, Global Knowledge Management, Deloitte

Bio Annie Wang, a Senior Manager of Global Knowledge Management at Deloitte, one of the largest professional services organizations in the world. In 2008, Deloitte has approximately 165,000 professionals in 140 countries. Annie is leading the enterprise taxonomy program for Deloitte. She is responsible for defining taxonomy/metadata management strategy and overall data strategy to enrich content and improve knowledge discovery. She is also leading a Learning-KM Task Force to identify, respond and address global initiatives that could benefit from a joint Learning-KM solution. After working in information industry for more than 15 years, Annie has developed expertise including global knowledge management operation, taxonomy & metadata management, enterprise search, and project management, etc. She speaks frequently at international conferences on taxonomy management, web search, and knowledge management. Prior to joining Deloitte, Annie was a Director of Data Strategy at Tribune Company.

Sessions By Annie Wang

Tom Witczak Manager, Hitachi Consulting

Sessions By Tom Witczak