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.
MARIA-ESTHER VIDAL
Marıa-Esther Vidal is a Full Professor of the Computer Science Department and Dean Assistant for Research on Applied Science and Engineering at the Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela. Her research in information management covers information integration, federated databases, graph data management, Linked Open Data, and the Semantic Web. Maria-Esther has addressed some of the most important challenges in selecting and modeling sources, rewriting queries, cost based optimization, graph query processing and optimization, 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. She has published her research results in the premier conferences and journals in Database Management, Artificial Intelligence, and the Semantic Web.