Functionality - Experts

George Athanasopoulos, Researcher, Department of Informatics & Telecommunications, University of Athens, Greece

George Athanasopoulos is a researcher at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens and a partner in DL.org. He holds a diploma from the Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics of the University of Patras and has participated in various research and development projects (e.g. SECSE, SODIUM, Interop-NOE) during his work experience. His research interests include service-oriented computing with a focus on the context-adaptable composition of heterogeneous services comprising various types of services e.g. Web services (either stateless or stateful), P2P services, sensor and actuator services, system interoperability, distributed systems and software architecture modeling as well as modern programming methodologies.

Vassilis Christophides, Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Crete, Greece

Vassilis Christophides is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Crete and an Associate Researcher in the Information Systems Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science, FORTH.

Ed Fox, Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, U.S.

Ed Fox is Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, where he runs the Digital Library Research Laboratory. He is one of the people who helped launch the field of digital libraries, and who has been involved since their inception in the ACM DL conference series, JCDL, and ICADL. He served on the DELOS Advisory Board and on JISC’s Repository Program Advisory Group, as well as organizing or program committees for many DL related activities. He was the first Policy Committee Chair for NSF’s NSDL. He has led development of the 5S framework, attended meetings about the DELOS Reference Model, was chair for 4 years of IEEE TCDL, is executive director for NDLTD, and been involved in many DL publications and diverse research/development projects related to DL interoperability including NCSTRL, OAI, ETANA, and NSDL.

Yannis Ioannidis, Professor at the Department of Informatics & Telecommunications, University of Athens, Greece

Yannis Ioannidis is currently Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens. He received his Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1982, his MSc in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, and his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986. His research interests include database and information systems, digital libraries, personalisation and social networks, scientific systems and workflows, eHealth systems, and human-computer interaction, topics on which he has published over a hundred articles in leading journals and conferences. His research has been funded by various government agencies (USA, Europe, Greece) or private industry in the context of over thirty research projects, including DELOS, BRICKS, DILIGENT, TELplus, PAPYRUS, and DL.org, which have a Digital Libraries focus. Dr. Ioannidis is a "Fellow" of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the recipient of the "Presidential Young Investigator" (PYI) award, of the Very Large Data Bases "10-Year Best Paper Award", and of several awards for teaching excellence. He is currently serving a 4-year term as the Chair of the Special Interest group on the Management of Data (SIGMOD) in the ACM and is a member of several scientific advisory boards, including the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and the National Council for Research and Technology of Greece.

George Kaletris, Department of Informatics & Telecommunications, University of Athens, Greece

George Kakaletris is currently a permanent member of staff at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens. He received his B.Sc. in Physics from University of Athens in 1994 and his MSc in Information Science in 2001. He is mainly involved in designing, developing and deploying integrated IT systems for both the public and the private sectors. He has also participated and technically managed several EU and national funded research projects, such as D4Science. He is certified by Microsoft Corporation as an MCP (1999), as well as application for Windows 2000 (Dimotis 2000 - Proto). His research interests include, among others, Optimisation through Computational Intelligence, Distributed Systems, Very Large Dataset Management, and Information Systems Architecture, with emphasis on Service and Component Oriented ones.

Natalia Manola, Senior Software Engineer

Natalia Manola is Senior Software Engineer holding a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Athens, Greece, and an M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, U.S. Her professional experience consists of several years of employment as a Software Engineer, Software Architect, Information Technology Administrator, and Information Technology Project Manager by companies in various Information Technology sectors in the U.S. and Greece. The systems she has designed and implemented include biotechnology and genetic applications, embedded financial monitoring systems, heterogeneous data integration systems and end-user personalized functionalities on digital libraries. She has also participated and technically managed several R&D projects (DRIVER & DRIVER-II, DIAS, COSMOS) funded by the European Union or by the national government.

Carlo Meghini, Prime Researcher, Institute of Information Science & Technologies, National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISTI)

Carlo Meghini is a prime researcher at CNR-ISTI. Over the last 20 years he has published more than 50 papers in international conferences and journals in the area of information systems. Since the beginning of the 1990s, he has been doing research on multimedia information retrieval, contributing the Multimedia Information Retrieval Model entry to the Encyclopedia of Database Systems. In the last 10 years, he has focused on Digital Libraries, publishing both on practical and theoretical aspects of Digital Libraries. He has been a task leader on information access in the DELOS Network of Excellence in Digital Libraries, and a contributor to the DELOS Reference Model. He has been deputy director of the foundations of the BRICKS Project, an FP6 Integrated Project aiming at developing a distributed Digital Library Management System. He is presently Stream Director in the CASPAR Project, an FP6 Integrated Project aiming at researching and developing components for the preservation of digital information based on the OAIS model. From February 2009, he is co-leader of the technical Work Package of Europeanav1.0 Thematic Network.

Andreas Rauber, Associate Professor, Department of Software Technology & Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

Andreas Rauber is Associate Professor at the Department of Software Technology and Interactive Systems (IFS) at the Vienna University of Technology (TU-Wien). He is also president of AARIT, the Austrian Association for Research in IT and a Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), University of Glasgow. He received his MSc and PhD in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology in 1997 and 2000, respectively. In 2001 he joined the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) in Pisa as an ERCIM Research Fellow, followed by an ERCIM Research position at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA), at Rocquencourt, France, in 2002. From 2004-2008 he was also head of the iSpaces research group at the eCommerce Competence Center (ec3). He has published numerous papers in refereed journals and international conferences and served as PC member and reviewer for several major journals, conferences and workshops. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence (ΦGAI). He serves on the board of the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries (TCDL), and was a member of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries as well as the MUSCLE Network of Excellence on Multimedia Understanding through Semantics, Computation and Learning. His research interests cover the broad scope of digital libraries and information spaces, including specifically text and music information retrieval and organization, information visualisation, as well as data analysis, neural computation and digital preservation.

Dagobert Soergel, Professor & Department Chair of Library & Information Studies, University at Buffalo, U.S.

Dagobert Soergel is Professor and Department Chair of Library & Information Studies, the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Since 2007 he has served as Onorario, Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Scienza dell'Informazione, University of Trento. He has been working in the area of classification (taxonomy, ontologies) and thesauri both practically and theoretically for over 40 years. He is the author of the still-standard text- and handbook Indexing Languages and Thesauri. Construction and Maintenance (Wiley 1974) and of Organizing Information (Academic Press 1985), which received the American Society of Information Science Best Book Award, and numerous papers and presentations in the area of classification / ontologies and more broadly in information science. He has taught courses at several universities in the US and Germany, and he is offering a long-running tutorial on Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) in Digital Libraries at the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) and at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) in the US. He was the chief architect for several thesauri, including the Alcohol and Other Drug Thesaurus and the Harvard Business Thesaurus. He has written about the future of digital libraries and led the editing team for the DELOS NoE in Digital Libraries response to the EU call for online consultation. He was a member of the DELOS Working Group on the DELOS Digital Library Reference Model. 1997 Dr. Soergel received the highest award of the American Society for Information Science, the Award of Merit and in 2009 the Contributions to Information Science (CISTA) Award of the Los Angeles Chapter of ASIST.