Core Team Members
Wouter Beek. PhD Student, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Computer Science, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Co-founder of Triply and builder of the Linked Open Data Laundromat.
Dr. Andrea Scharnhorst*. Data Archiving and Networked Services, KNAW, NWO, Netherlands
Andrea Scharnhorst holds a Diploma in Statistical Physics and a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science both from the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She is head of the Research and Innovation Competence Group at Data Archiving and Networked Services – an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research. She works currently also as Chief Integration Officer at DARIAH.EU – an ERIC in the humanities and social sciences. She has edited books about innovation processes (with Andreas Pyka; Innovation Networks; Springer 2009); new research practices in the humanities (with Anne Beaulieu, Paul Wouters, Sally Wyatt; Virtual Knowledge; MIT 2012) and understanding science dynamics (with Katy Börner, Peter van den Besselaar; Models of Science Dynamics; Springer 2012). She has been awarded numerous project grants on national and international level. Most recently, the NWO grant Re-Search and the TAP grant Digging into the Knowledge Graph. From 2013-2017 she chaired the COST Action TD1210 Knowescape. She has co-run a digital humanities programme at the former eHumanities group at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2011 to 2016.
Professor Richard Smiraglia**. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, United States
Richard P. Smiraglia is Professor in the Knowledge Organization Research Group of the iSchool at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a Visiting Professor for 2016-2017 at DANS – Data Archives and Networked Services (a Division of the Royal Netherlands Academy of the Arts and Sciences), and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Knowledge Organization. He has also been on the faculties of the Palmer School of Library and Information Science at Long Island University (1992-2009), the School of Library Service at Columbia University (1986-1992) and was Music Catalog Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1974-1986). His work explores ontology extraction and evolution of knowledge in domains, classification interaction, classification-based knowledge maps, the cultural role of authorship, the representation of knowledge in knowledge organization systems and the phenomenon of instantiation among information objects. He has collaborated with the Knowledge Space Lab (Amsterdam) on knowledge maps and ontogeny of UDC and is currently working with Rick Szostak on comparisons between UDC and Basic Concepts Classification on interdisciplinarity. The objective of his year with DANS is to discover ways to use classification to overcome silos in data repositories as well as with the LOD Cloud. See more on his website and his blog.
Professor Rick Szostak*. University of Alberta, Canada
Rick Szostak is Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Alberta, where he has worked since gaining his PhD in economics from Northwestern in 1985. Originally an economic historian, he became a scholar of interdisciplinarity in the 1990s and has published widely on the theory and practice of interdisciplinary research and teaching. Conscious that the disciplinary organization of libraries hampers interdisciplinary communication, he has in the last fifteen years urged changes in knowledge organization systems that would facilitate interdisciplinarity. He has developed the Basic Concepts Classification to that end. Key publications include his co-authored Interdisciplinary Knowledge Organization (2016) and his Classifying Science (2004). An outline of his classification research (with a link to the Basic Concepts Classification) can be found at The University of Alberta Department of Economics Google Site.
Additional Collaborators
Assistant Professor Daniel Martínez-Ávila. São Paulo State University, Brazil
Daniel Martínez-Ávila, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Science, São Paulo State University (UNESP), Marília, Brazil. He holds a PhD in Library and Information Science from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. He is a member of the International Society for Knowledge Organization Scientific Advisory Council, and collaborates with both the Satija Research Foundation for Library and Information Science, New Delhi, India, and the Institute for Gender Studies (IEG) at University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain. His research interests include knowledge organization, the application of critical theory, and epistemology.
Dr. Ronald Siebes. Postdoctoral Research Associate. Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands
Ronald holds a PhD from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where his research was centered around distributed reasoning and search in peer-to-peer technologies.
Dr. Aida Slavic. Editor in Chief, Universal Decimal Classification
Aida holds a PhD in Library and Information Studies from University College London, and works as the editor-in-chief of the Universal Decimal Classification.
Professor Frank van Harmelen. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Group, Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands
Frank holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, Department of Artificial Intelligence, where his work centered on meta-level reasoning. He has played a key role in the development of the Semantic Web, focusing on reasoning and machine interoperability.
Dr. Stefan Schlobach. Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands
Stefan is an Associate Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Department of Computer Science. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from King’s College London.
Professor Victor de Boer. Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands
Victor de Boer is an Assistant Professor at the Web and Media group of the Computer Science department of VU University Amsterdam and he is Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. His research focuses on data integration, semantic data enrichment and knowledge sharing using Linked Data technologies in various domains. These domains include Cultural Heritage, Digital Humanities and ICT for Development where he collaborates with domain experts in interdisciplinary teams. To read more about his work, visit
http://victordeboer.com.
Graduate Assistants:
Vanessa Schlais***. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, United States
Vanessa Schlais is a doctoral student and member of the Knowledge Organization Research Group at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She holds a Masters of Library and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Laura Ridenour. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, United States
Laura Ridenour is a doctoral candidate and member of the Knowledge Organization Research Group at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She holds a Master of Information Science from Indiana University Bloomington. Laura is a LEADS-4-NDP (LIS Education and Data Science for the National Digital Platform) Fellow for the summer of 2018, and an Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) New Leader (2016-2018). She serves as the ASIS&T SIG/CR Secretary/Treasurer (2016-2018), and President for the International Society for Knowledge Organization Canada and United States (2017-2019).
Past Collaborators
Dr. Reinier de Valk (2017)
*Principal Investigators
**Primary Principal Investigator
***Dedicated Graduate Assistant