Professor Stefan Decker
Dr. rer-pol, Dipl.-Inform.
Director Digital Enterprise Research Institute
National University of Ireland, Galway
TEL: + 353 91 49 5011
FAX: + 353 91 49 5541
EMAIL: Stefan.Decker  'AT' DERI . org

 I am a professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway, director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute and Cluster Leader of the Semantic Web Cluster within the institute.
Previously I worked at ISI, University of Southern California (2 years, Research Assistent Professor and Computer Scientist), Stanford University, Computer Science Department (Database Group) (3 Years, PostDoc and Research Associate), and Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (4 years, PhD Student and Junior Researcher).

My main research field is the Semantic Web.

The usual academic self promotion: CiteSeer sees me at rank 1035 in their list of most cited computer scientists (see http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/allcitedn.html) and Google Scholar gives an idea which of my papers are highly cited. Another list of publications is maintained by DBLP. According to 'Harzing's Publish or Perish' my h-index is 30  (Method: author search: S. Decker, delete all paper which are not mine). The list of 30 publications with at least 30 citations and citation count is available here. (An interesting aspect of using the h-index is, that journal publications don't count as much any more - it is rather the real overall impact. This is good news especially for fields like computer science, where most knowledge dissemination is happening in conferences. Now if only university promotion boards would use this information...).

Past accomplishments include:

• Together with Dan Brickley, Janne Saarela, and Jürgen Angele I created the first RDF Query and Inference system based on F-Logic (see the QL'98 paper).
• My work on Ontobroker (joint work with Dieter Fensel and Michael Erdmann) was cited as an inspiration for the DARPA DAML program, which heavily influenced the Semantic Web effort and lead to the development of OWL.
• The Semantic Web information foodchain presented in an ECDL 2000 paper and depicted at SemanticWeb.org is widely used as an architectual model and motivation for Semantic Web technology.
• Since I perceived an editing environment as being critical for the success of Semantic Web standards I pushed for Protege becoming Open Source and wrote the first RDF/RDF Schema import/export backend  for Protege (see my announcement to the RDF interest mailing list).
• Together with Ian Horrocks I created an RDF representation for the Description Logic SHIQ. The result was merged with the at the time XML-based OIL. Later the RDF part of OIL was input for DAML+OIL (I was member of the DAML+OIL Joint Committee), which in turn was input for OWL - the Web Ontology Language.
• Together with Wolfgang Nejdl I cofounded the Edutella project, the first metadata exchange infrastructure for RDF.
• Together with Mario Schlosser, Michael Sintek and Wolfgang Nejdl we created HyperCuP, the first Ontology-based routing algorithm and hypercube topology for P2P networks. HyperCuP has been used by a couple of projects as a P2P topology.
• I initiated and co-organized (with Isabel Cruz, Jerome Euzenat, and Deborah McGuinness) the Semantic Web Working Symposium at Stanford University, the first large scale Semantic Web event (> 250 participants), which spanned the International Semantic Web Conference, which is now organized by the Semantic Web Science Association (currently led by the SWSA management team: Dieter Fensel, Rudi Studer, Jim Hendler, Ian Horrocks, and Jerome Euzenat).

The Semantic Web is only the beginning and an enabling technology for realizing the dreams of Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee: My current and future objective is the creation and wide dissemination of the next generation collaboration and augmentation infrastructure - the Social Semantic Desktop. Ongoing and future steps towards realizing these ideas include:

1. Researching the technological prerequisites for making the Social Semantic Desktop possible. These include Semantic Web, P2P, and Social Networks.
2. Establishing a large scale project which includes multinationals like IBM, HP and SAP, small companies like Cognium,  research institutes like FZI, DFKI, L3S and DERI, application partners like Institute Louis Pasteur, and a dissemination partner like Edge-IT (Mandriva Linux). The goal of the project is to provide a crystallization point for the development of the infrastructure.
3. Creation of a series of events which help to provide a focus and exchange point for the community. The first event is the Semantic Desktop workshop at the International Semantic Web Conference 2005.
4. Creation of a not-for profit organization, which will organize the events and provide a crystallization and coordination point for community activities.