PRESENTER BIOS

Dean Allemang, Senior Consultant, TopQuadrant
As a Senior Consultant at TopQuadrant, Dean specializes in developing business cases for semantic technologies. In 1996, he became co-founder and VP of Customer Engineering of Synquiry technologies, one of the first Semantic Technology companies in the US. He is co-chair of the International Semantic Web Conference Industrial Track, and has filed two patents related to semantic web technology. Dean combines a strong formal background (having completed a MSc in Mathematics, University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar and PhD in Computer Science as a NSF Fellow at the Ohio State University) with years of experience applying knowledge-based technologies to real business problems. Dean is a lecturer in Computer Science at Boston University.

Dianne Kennedy, VP Publishing Technologies, IDEAlliance
Dianne Kennedy has a long history in publishing, beginning with her experience as a editor/writer for the textbook division of Doubleday. Ms. Kennedy began working with in publishing technologies while employed at Datalogics, Inc. There she participated in numerous SGML standards activities including DoD CALS, ATA Specifications and chaired SAE J2008 SGML work in the automotive industry. In 1997, Ms. Kennedy was named Chief Technical Consultant for IDEAlliance and served as editor of the XML Files. Kennedy was chairperson for the IDEAlliance XML USA Conferences from 1998 - 2000. She authored chapters for The XML Handbook, Mastering XML and XML and Web Services Unleashed. Currently Ms. Kennedy serves as the Vice President of Publishing Technologies and Membership for IDEAlliance. Ms. Kennedy works closely with the IDEAlliance metadata initiatives.

Steve Pepper, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Ontopia, Norway
Steve Pepper is the founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Ontopia, a company that provides topic map software, consulting, and training services.Steve represents Norway on JTC1/SC34, the ISO committee responsible for the development of SGML and related standards, and is convenor of WG3 (Information Association), whose responsibilities include the HyTime and Topic Maps standards. He is the editor of the XML Topic Maps specification (XTM) and the author of numerous papers and presentations on topic map-related subjects, including the well-known "TAO of Topic Maps". A frequent speaker at SGML, XML, and knowledge management events around the world, Steve was for many years the author and maintainer of the "Whirlwind Guide to SGML and XML tools". He also co-authored (with Charles Goldfarb and Chet Ensign) the "SGML Buyer's Guide" (Prentice-Hall, 1998).

David Wood, W3C Semantic Web Best Practices & Deployment Working Group
Partner, Software Memetics, Inc., United States
David Wood consults to universities and commercial organizations to refine software development practices. Wood serves as the co-chair of the W3C Semantic Web Best Practices & Deployment Working Group and as a member of the W3C Semantic Web Coordination Group. He is a principal sponsor of the Kowari Metastore (kowari.org), a scalable and transaction safe database for RDF and OWL data.

Wood was recently co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Tucana Technologies, Inc., producer of the Tucana Knowledge Server. Prior to founding Tucana, Wood was co-founder and CTO of Plugged In Software where he led a software engineering services team employing leading edge software development methodologies including Extreme Programming and Spiral RAD. Wood has consulted to Netscape Communications, Wells Fargo Bank and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where among other projects he worked on one of the world’s earliest and largest extranet applications – a document retrieval and transfer system for 300 US manufacturing companies.

Wood’s career in technology began in the United States Navy where he served first as an aerospace systems engineer and a deep sea salvage engineer.

Wood holds the degrees of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineer, MS in Astronautical Engineering, BS Electrical Engineering and BS Mechanical Engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and Virginia Military Institute. Wood is currently a PhD candidate in Complex Adaptive Systems in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland in Australia.  He is the co-author of several patent pending technologies.  Wood has been published extensively including Programming Internet Email, published by O’Reilly and Associates (1999).