Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (AIFB)

The Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe has grounded experience in the fields of knowledge man-agement, intelligent information integration, web-based broker architectures, knowledge engineering and knowledge discovery.

The Ontobroker and GETESS projects (funded by the German Ministry of Research and Technol-ogy) provide advanced information access to information sources at the web. Ontologies are used to define semantic access to semistructured information and free texts. As part of these projects environ-ments offering sophisticated means for ontology engineering and learning from natural language are developed.

The institute is involved in many industry-university cooperations, both on a European and a national level, including a number of intelligent web systems case studies. Currently, the institute AIFB is participating in the EU basic research project IBROW and the IST project On-to-Knowledge. The Institute AIFB is subcontractor in the OntoAgents project (part of the DARPA DAML initiative), where the goal is to establish an agent infrastructure on the WWW or WWW-like networks.

Prof. Dr. Rudi Studer is the head of the knowledge management research group, and obtained a Diploma in Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart in 1975. In 1982 he was awarded a Doctor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science (Dr. rer. nat.) at the University of Stuttgart and 1985 he obtained his Habilitation in Computer Science. From July 1985 to October 1989 he was project leader and manager at IBM Germany, Institute of Knowledge Based Systems. Since November 1989 he has been a full professor in "Applied Computer Science", University of Karlsruhe. Since 1993, he has been the speaker of the Special Interest Group "Knowledge Management" of the Gesellschaft fuer Informatik (GI) in Germany. His current research interests include knowledge management, knowledge engineering, intelligent web brokers, and knowledge discovery.

Dr. Steffen Staab is Assistant Professor for Applied Computer Science at Karlsruhe University. He studied Computer at Erlangen University, Germany. In 1993 and 1994 he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, where he earned a M.S.E. in Computer and Informa-tion Science. He received a scholarship from the German National Science Foundation for joining a graduate program in Cognitive Science (Computational Linguistics) that led up to his PhD in Computer Science from Freiburg University, Germany, in 1998. Steffen Staab is project manager in the Ger-man government-funded GETESS project on ontology-based information extraction. He has organised several international workshops on ontologies and ontology-based applications. He has published in the fields of information extraction, knowledge representation and reasoning, knowledge management, knowledge discovery, and intelligent systems for the web.

Dipl. Inform. Raphael Volz studied informatics and life sciences at the Universities of Heidelberg and Karlsruhe. Visiting the Information Technologies Research Lab of Swiss Life, Zuerich, he wrote his master thesis on "Acquisition of ontologies using Text-Mining". Raphael is now a PhD-student at the Knowledge Management group of the University of Karlsruhe(TH) with Prof. Rudi Studer. His current research interest is the intersection of traditional database theory and Semantic Web techologies. He enjoys playing pipe organ and enthusiastically attends a semi-professional choir.

Dipl. Inform. Daniel Oberle studied informatics at the University of Technology, Karlsruhe. He specialized in distributed systems and data-modeling. After receiving his first diploma, he continued at University of Karlsruhe and specialized in knowledge management and logic. He wrote his second diploma thesis on "Ontology-Views" at the Institute AIFB. Daniel is now a PhD-student at the Knowledge Management group with Professor Rudi Studer. His current research interest is the logic-layer of the Semantic Web.