Ontolog Forum
Stefan Decker
Stefan Decker is a professor at RWTH Aachen University, and a Director of the Fraunhofer FIT Research Institute, part of the Fraunhofer Society.
Previously Stefan worked at the National University of Ireland, Galway and as the Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute and later Insight at NUI Galway (12 years), at ISI, University of Southern California (2 years, Research Assistent Professor and Computer Scientist), Stanford University, Computer Science Department (Database Group) (3 Years, PostDoc and Research Associate), and Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (now KIT Karlsruhe) (4 years, PhD Student and Junior Researcher).
His main research field is the Semantic Web.
Fraunhofer FIT and Stefan's chair i5 at RWTH Aachen is now contributing to a large number of different dataspace initiatives and projects: NFDI4Health, NFDI4DataScience, SMITH, common European Energy Dataspace, common European Green Deal Dataspace, german mobility dataspace, to name a few..
Together with Ian Horrocks Stefan created an RDF representation for the Description Logic SHIQ. The result was merged with the at the time XML-based OIL. Then the RDF part of OIL was the main input for DAML+OIL (he was member of the DAML+OIL Joint Committee), which in turn was the main input for OWL - the Web Ontology Language.
The W3C DCAT recommendation was created by a PhD student of Stefan during his PhD Work (Fadi Maali) and suggested to the commission by Vasillios Peristeras. It is now the standard metadata format for all Open Data portals in the European Union.
Stefan initiated and co-organized (with Isabel Cruz, Jerome Euzenat, and Deborah McGuinness) the Semantic Web Working Symposium at Stanford University, the first large scale Semantic Web event (> 250 participants), which spanned the International Semantic Web Conference, which is now organized by the Semantic Web Science Association.
Stefan coined and established the term Social Semantic Desktop for Personal Knowledge Management with Semantic Web Methods and initiated a large scale EU project (Budget: 17.5 M Euro) dubbed NEPOMUK which included multinationals like IBM, HP and SAP, small companies like Cognium, research institutes like FZI, DFKI, L3S and DERI, application partners like Institute Louis Pasteur, and a dissemination partner like Edge-IT (Mandriva Linux). The goal of the project was to provide a crystallization point for the development of the Semantic Desktop infrastructure. The results are now part of KDE and distributed with Linux.
Since Stefan perceived an editing environment as being critical for the success of Semantic Web standards he pushed for Protege becoming Open Source and wrote the first RDF import/export for Protege, which made Protege compatible with Semantic Web standards (see my announcement to the RDF interest mailing list). Protege is still the most popular editor for Semantic Web Ontologies.
His work on Ontobroker (joint work with Dieter Fensel and Michael Erdmann) was cited as an inspiration for the DARPA DAML program, which heavily influenced the Semantic Web effort and lead to the development of OWL. His PhD thesis on the Semantic Web was one of the first in the field, exploring the use of Semantic Web technologies for Knowledge Management.
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