Ralf Schenkel is a Research Group Leader at Saarland University and an associated senior researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics. The focus of his work has been on efficient retrieval algorithms for text and XML data, graph indexing, and search in social networks. Within the context of the WisNetGrid project, he is coordinating the efforts on knowledge extraction and knowledge-based search in D-Grid, the German Grid infrastructure.