John Breslin is currently a lecturer in Electronic Engineering at the School of Engineering and Informatics, National University of Ireland, Galway (NUI Galway). He is also an associate researcher and leader of the Social Software Unit at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway, researching semantically-enabled social networks and community portals. He is the founder of the SIOC initiative, which aims to semantically-interlink online communities. He has received a number of awards for website design, including two Net Visionary awards from the Irish Internet Association for the Irish community website boards.ie, which he co-founded in 2000. He is a member of the IEI, IET and IEEE.

Alexandre Passant is currently a postdoctoral researcher and adjunct lecturer at DERI, NUI Galway. His research activities focus around the Semantic Web and Social Software: in particular, how these fields can interact with and benefit from each other in order to provide a socially-enabled machine-readable Web, leading to new services and paradigms for end users. Prior to joining DERI, he was a PhD student at Université Paris-Sorbonne and carried out applied research work on “Semantic Web technologies for Enterprise 2.0” at Electricité De France. He is the co-author of SIOC, a model to represent the activities of online communities on the Semantic Web, the author of MOAT, a framework to let people tag their content using Semantic Web technologies, and is also involved in various related applications as well as standardisation activities.

Stefan Decker is a professor at NUI Galway, and is the director of DERI. Previously, he worked at ISI in the University of Southern California for two years as a research assistant professor and computer scientist, at Stanford University’s Computer Science Department (Database Group) for three years as a postdoctoral researcher and research associate, and at Institute AIFB in the University of Karlsruhe for four years as a PhD student and junior researcher. He is one of the most widely-cited Semantic Web scientists, and his current research interests include semantics in collaborative systems, Web 2.0, and distributed systems.