I am a researcher, German and Swedish citizen and come from a small village outside Siegsdorf in Upper Bavaria. I currently live in the city of Bad Reichenhall (in the Alpes of Berchtesgaden). I hold a PhD (Dr.rer.nat.) in Computer Science and work as a senior researcher and head of the knowledge and media technologies group (KMT) at Salzburg Research in Salzburg/Austria. I am also Scientific Director of Salzburg NewMediaLab, Austria’s industrial competence centre for new media, which is concerned about the convergence of Social Software, Semantic Web, and Multimedia Content. Until July 2005, I worked as a research and teaching assistant at the teaching unit for programming and modelling languages at the University of Munich/Germany, where I finished my PhD in December 2004.

Starting March 2008, I am also coordinator of the EU specific targeted research project KIWI – Knowledge in a Wiki (project no. 211932) funded under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union. KIWI is concerned with knowledge management in Semantic Wikis, and I am really looking forward to the work we’ll do in this project. The KIWI consortium consists of 7 partners; besides Salzburg Research, these are the Aalborg University in Denmark, the Technical University of Brno in the Czech Republic, the University of Munich, Germany, Sun Microsystems in Prague, Czech Republic, Semantic Web Company in Vienna, Austria, and Logica/WM-Data in Copenhagen, Denmark.

My current research interests are in the areas of Web 2.0, Semantic Web technologies, particularly knowledge representation and reasoning, and Social Software. These strands converge in the Semantic Wiki system IkeWiki, of which I am the main developer. I have also developed the first version of the Semantic Web query and reasoning language Xcerpt as part of my PhD thesis. Recently, I have been more and more recognised as the “Social Semantic Web” guy, which probably pretty accurately describes my current work.