CLAUDIA D’AMATO 
Dr Claudia d’Amato is a research assistant at the University of Bari – Computer Science Department. She obtained her PhD in 2007 from the University of Bari, Italy, defending the thesis titled “Similarity Based Learning Methods for the Semantic Web. She pioneered the research on Machine Learning methods for ontology mining that represents her main research interest. During her research activity she won several best paper awards. She is member of the editorial board of the Semantic Web Journal and Journal of Web Semantics. She served/is serving as Program Chair at ESWC 2014, Vice-Chair at ISWC’09, Machine Learning Track Co-Chair at ESWC’12-’13-’16, PhD Symposium chair at ESWC’15 and Workshop and Tutorial Co-Chair at ISWC’12, EKAW’12, ICSC’12. She served/is serving as a program committee member of a number of international conferences in the area of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Semantic Web such as AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, ECML, ISWC, WWW, ESWC. She was also co-organizers of the International Workshop on Inductive Reasoning and Machine Learning on the Semantic Web at ESCW’09-’11, the International Uncertainty Reasoning Workshop at ISCW’07-’11, the International Workshop on Linked Data for Information Extraction at ISWC’13-15, the International Workshop on Data Mining on Linked Data at ECML/PKDD’13, the International Workshop on Linked Data for Knowledge Discovery ECML/PKDD’15 and the International Workshop on Cross-fertilizing diverse Domains with and within the Semantic Web at ISWC’15.
MATHIEU D’AQUIN
Mathieu d’Aquin is a Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute of the The Open University. He obtained is PhD in 2005 from the University of Nancy, France, where he worked on concrete applications of semantic technologies in the medical domain. He is now leading research around concrete solutions for the realization of applications producing and consuming linked data, as well as on more fundamental aspects of the Semantic Web (ontology modularization, evolution and matching, Semantic Web reasoning and analysis). He has been a key member in a number of European projects applying linked data and Semantic Web technologies in a variety of concrete scenarios. He was also director of the LUCERO project responsible for setting up the Open University’s Linked Data platform – http://data.open.ac.uk. Mathieu d’Aquin was Vice-Chair for the 2010 conference on Web Intelligence, Chair of the Ontology Track at the Extended Semantic Web Conference 2011, Vice-director of the International Summer School on Ontological Reasoning and the Semantic Web in 2009 and 2011, senior programme committee member for the International Semantic Web Conference in 2011, Poster and Demo chair of EKAW 2012. He will also be program chair for the K-CAP 2013 conference in Banff, Canada. Mathieu d’Aquin was recognised in 2011 as one of the 10 most promising young researchers in artificial intelligence, through the “AI 10 to watch” award from the prestigious magazine IEEE Intelligent Systems, and has won numerous other awards especially related to innovative applications of semantic technologies.
IRENE CELINO
Irene Celino has been the Coordinator of the “Data & Web Science” research group at CEFRIEL since 2008. Her research activities cover the application of Human Computation and Semantic Web/Linked Data technologies to the development of web portals, search engines, recommendations systems and mobile games, especially in Smart City scenarios: in 2011 she won the Semantic Web Challenge for the urban social media analysis application BOTTARI and the Artificial Intelligence Mashup Challenge for the semantic traffic-aware routing application Traffic LarKC, in 2012 she was ranked among the finalists of the same challenge with the citizen-centric Game with a Purpose Urbanopoly, in 2014 she won the Telecom Italia Big Data Challenge for the urban planning supporting application Living Land Use and in 2015 she won the Semantic Web Challenge for the urban data integration app 3cixty. She has more than a decade of experience in cooperative research projects, both at National/Regional level (NeP4B, SPAC3, PROACTIVE, SmartCulture, Simulator) and at European level within FP6 (SUPER, SEEMP and COCOON), FP7 (PlanetData, LarKC, PANDORA, SOA4All and Service-Finder), H2020 (IT2Rail, STARS4ALL) and EIT Digital (PIAZZA, 3cixty, Connecting Digital Cities). She is author of more than 70 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals, books and conferences.
OSCAR CORCHO
Oscar Corcho is an Associate Professor at Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial (Facultad de Informática , Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), and he belongs to the Ontology Engineering Group. His research activities are focused on Semantic e-Science and Real World Internet, although he also works in the more general areas of Semantic Web and Ontological Engineering. In these areas, he has participated in a number of EU projects (Wf4Ever, PlanetData, SemsorGrid4Env, ADMIRE, OntoGrid, Esperonto, Knowledge Web and OntoWeb), and Spanish R&D projects (CENITS mIO!, España Virtual and Buscamedia, myBigData, GeoBuddies), and has also participated in privately-funded projects like ICPS (International Classification of Patient Safety), funded by the World Health Organisation, and HALO, funded by Vulcan Inc. Previously, he worked as a Marie Curie research fellow at the University of Manchester, and was a research manager at iSOCO. He holds a degree in Computer Science, an MSc in Software Engineering and a PhD in Computational Science and Artificial Intelligence from UPM. He was awarded the Third National Award by the Spanish Ministry of Education in 2001. He has published several books, from which “Ontological Engineering” can be highlighted as it is being used as a reference book in a good number of university lectures worldwide, and more than 100 papers in journals, conferences and workshops. He usually participates in the organisation or in the programme committees of relevant international conferences and workshops.
EMANUELE DELLA VALLE
Emanuele Della Valle holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a Master degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Politecnico di Milano. He is assistant professor at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano. In more than 15 years of research, his research interests covered Big Data, Stream Processing, Semantic technologies, Data Science, Web Information Retrieval, and Service Oriented Architectures. He started the stream reasoning research field to investigate how to tame simultaneously the velocity (analysing data streams to enable real-time decisions) and variety (integrating heterogeneous data) dimensions of Big Data. In 2015, he started up a company (Fluxedo) to commercialize the open source results of Stream Reasoning research.
ALDO GANGEMI
Aldo Gangemi is professor at LIPN, University Paris 13 (Sorbonne Paris Cité, CNRS UMR 7030), and makes research at Italian National Research Council, Rome. He has founded and directed the Semantic Technology Lab (STLab) of ISTC-CNR since 2008 (he previously co-founded the Applied Ontology Lab in Trento). His research focuses on Semantic Technologies as an integration of methods from Knowledge Engineering, the Semantic Web, Linked Data, Cognitive Science, and Natural Language Processing. His theoretical interests concentrate upon the representation and discovery of knowledge patterns across data, ontology, natural language, and cognition. Applications domains include Medicine, Law, eGovernment, Agriculture and Fishery, Business, and Cultural Heritage. He has published more than 200 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, conferences and books, and seats as EB member of international journals (Semantic Web, Applied Ontology, J. of Web Semantics), as conference chair (LREC2006, EKAW2008, WWW2015), and advisory committee member for international organizations. He has worked in the EU projects: Galen, WonderWeb, OntoWeb, Metokis, NeOn, BONy, IKS, and MARIO.
FRANK VAN HARMELEN
Frank van Harmelen is professor in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning at the VU University Amsterdam. He has been involved in the Semantic Web research programme since it’s inception in the late ’90s. He is one of the co-designers of the W3C ontology representation language OWL, and was involved in the design of Sesame, one of the most widely used RDF repositories world wide. He is co-author of the Semantic Web Primer, the first textbook on Semantic Web technologies, now translated into 5 languages. He was scientific director of the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC), which aimed to build a platform for very large scale distributed reasoning. Besides research into the fundamental questions such as inconsistency, scalability, heterogeneity, and dynamicity, he is also involved in a wide variety of applications of semantic technologies, among others in medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, scientific publishing and e-science. His work on the Sesame triplestore received the 2012 “ISWC 10 year impact award”, and he was elected member of the European Academy of Science in 2014.
TOMI KAUPPINEN
Tomi Kauppinen is a project leader and docent at the Aalto University School of Science in Finland. He holds a habilitation (2014) in geoinformatics from the University of Muenster in Germany and a Ph.D. (2010) in media technology from the Aalto University. From April 2014 to September 2014 he was appointed as the Cognitive Systems Substitute Professor at the University of Bremen in Germany. He has been active in opening and sharing data, and created semantic recommendation and exploration engines. A central theme in his work and teaching is data science and information visualization applied to spatio-temporal phenomena, and supporting understanding of related cognitive processes. He has actively created online tutorials on these themes and run related courses and tutorials in international conferences and universities. He has co-chaired workshops on visual approaches, spatial thinking and linked science, including the International Workshops on Linked Science 2011-2015 at the International Semantic Web Conferences. He is also the founder and community leader of LinkedScience.org.
AXEL POLLERES
Axel Polleres joined the Institute of Information Business of Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien) in Sept 2013 as a full professor in the area of “Data and Knowledge Engineering”. He obtained his doctorate and habilitation from Vienna University of Technology and worked at University of Innsbruck, Austria, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and for Siemens AG’s Corporate Technology Research division before joining WU Wien. His research focuses on querying and reasoning about ontologies, rules languages, logic programming, Semantic Web technologies, Web services, knowledge management, Linked Open Data, configuration technologies and their applications. He has worked in several European and national research projects in these areas. Axel has published more than 100 articles in journals, books, and conference and workshop contributions and co-organised several international conferences and workshops in the areas of logic programming, Semantic Web, data management, Web services and related topics and acts as editorial board member for SWJ and IJSWIS. Moreover, he actively contributed to international standardisation efforts within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) where he co-chaired the W3C SPARQL working group.
VALENTINA PRESUTTI
Valentina Presutti received her Ph.D in Computer Science in 2006 at the University of Bologna (Italy). Currently, she is a researcher and scientific coordinator at the Semantic Technology Laboratory of the National Research Council (CNR), in Rome. Her research interests includes ontology design, knowledge representation, knowledge integration, knowledge extraction, and human-robot interaction. She is currently working on ontology design patterns for linked data publishing and on natural language-based interaction between robots and people with dementia. She actively contributes to the Semantic Web community. She has been committed in various organisation and scientific roles including General Chair of ESWC 2014 and Program Chair of ESWC 2013 and iSemantics 2012. She started the series of workshops on ontology design patterns and the associated ontologydesignpatterns.org initiative, and she is a board member of the Ontology Design Pattern Association.
MARTA SABOU
Dr Marta Sabou is a Senior Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology, where she leads a group of researchers in the area of semantic representation and integration of engineering data in the context of automation systems. Prior to this, she was an Assistant Professor at the Department of New Media Technology and a Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute, Open University. She holds a PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, for which she received the IEEE Intelligent System’s Ten to Watch Award (2006). She established herself as a core member of the Semantic Web community already during her PhD and then continued to work in this area and publish in the best conferences (WWW, Int. Semantic Web Conferences) and journals (Journal of Web Semantics, IEEE Intelligent Systems.). She has investigated several topics related to Semantic Web research ranging from ontology engineering tasks (ontology creation, mapping, modularisation) to the creation of intelligent systems that benefit from semantic information in domains as varied as tourism, climate change or open government. Her current interest is on data integration issues, with a special focus on the domain of industrial automation and Industry 4.0. She takes an active role in the Semantic Web research community. She acts as an editorial board member for three journals that publish Semantic Web research (SWJ, IJSWIS, JoDS) and has been engaged in several senior conference organization activities, including: WebScience Track co-chair at WWW’16; Resources Track co-chair at ISWC’16 and program co-chair for ESWC’15 and iSemantics’2013.
GIOVANNI SARTOR
Giovanni Sartor is part-time professor in Legal Informatics at the University of Bologna and part-time professor in Legal informatics and Legal Theory at the European University Institute of Florence. He obtained a PhD at the European University Institute (Florence), worked at the Court of Justice of the European Union (Luxembourg), was a researcher at the Italian National Council of Research (ITTIG, Florence), held the chair in Jurisprudence at Queen’s University of Belfast, and was Marie-Curie professor at the European University of Florence. He has been President of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law. He has published widely in legal philosophy, computational logic, legislation technique, and computer law. He is co-director of the Artificial Intelligence and Law Journal and co-editor of the Ratio Juris Journal. His research interests include legal theory, logic, argumentation theory, modal and deontic logics, logic programming, multiagent systems, computer and Internet law, data protection, e-commerce, law and technology, aviation law, human rights.
MARIA-ESTHER VIDAL
Maria-Esther Vidal is a Full Professor (on-leave) of the Computer Science Department at the Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela, and a Visiting Professor and Senior Research Scientist for “Enterprise Information Systems” at the University of Bonn. Her interests include data and knowledge management, knowledge representation and mining, semantic web, and biomedical information management. Maria-Esther has addressed some of the most important challenges in selecting and modeling sources, rewriting queries, cost based optimisation, graph query processing and optimisation, and benchmarks for federated SPARQL query processing. Her proposed strategies have had significant relevant from the early days of information integration in the Web, in the late 90s, and to the emergence of the Semantic Web and SPARQL endpoints. Maria-Esther has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in the Semantic Web, Databases, Bioinformatics, and Artificial Intelligence. She is part of various editorial boards (e.g., JWS, JDIQ), and has been co-chair, senior member, and reviewer of several scientific events and journals (e.g., ISWC, AAAI, AMW, WWW, KDE).