Dan Brickley is a researcher, advocate and developer of Semantic Web technologies. He currently combines commercial work (through his own tiny company Semantic Web Vapourware Ltd., aka SpyPixel, and at Asemantics S.R.L.) with ongoing involvement in Web standards as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Bristol. Dan served for six years as a member of the W3C Technical Staff, and now brings over twelve years' experience of knowledge sharing technologies to his work on practical Semantic Web deployment.

Dan founded the Bristol University ILRT Semantic Web group in 1997, exploring RDF-based knowledge engineering issues from a digital library, Social Science and elearning perspective. Dan was a PI on the HARMONY multimedia metadata project, and played a leading role in IST-funded research at ILRT including early work on RDF quality labelling, thesaurus, query and rules in the DESIRE project. Dan was Technical Director of the MedCertain (EU Safer Internet) project, applying W3C RDF technology to problems of quality and trust in consumer-facing health/medical Web content.

Mills is the founder and managing director of Project10X, specializing in industry research and strategic programs. Mills consults with technology manufacturers, global 2000 corporations, and government agencies on next-wave semantic technologies and solutions. Mills serves as lead for the Federal CIO council’s Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP) research into the business value of semantic technologies. Also, he is a founding member of the AIIM interoperable enterprise content management (iECM) working group, and a founding member of the National Center for Ontology Research (NCOR).

Alan is Professor of Computing at the University Of Lancaster, and "works on most things that connect people and computers. However, I started off as a mathematician and this is still my academic first love". Alan is also the co-author of 'Human-Computer Interaction' and ' An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence', both classic textbooks in their respective areas.

Stefan is 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 Stefan 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).

His main research field is the Semantic Web.

Nova Spivack is a technology visionary and entrepreneur with nearly two decades of experience in pioneering ventures.

Nova is CEO and Founder of Radar Networks, a stealth-mode technology venture located in San Francisco. Radar Networks is developing a fundamental new technology for enriching content that will open up a new dimension of the Web. The company anticipates releasing its first products in 2007.>/p>

In 1994, Nova co-founded EarthWeb , one of the first Internet companies, where he was Executive Vice-President for Products, Strategy and Marketing. EarthWeb went public in 1999 and resulted in the Nasdaq's largest IPO single-day percentage point gain up to that point, spawning a wave of Tech IPOs. Nova left EarthWeb’s board of directors in 1999 and began advising startups and angel investing. During the down-years of the post-Internet-bubble, EarthWeb’s content properties were acquired in 2000 by Internet.com. The company’s Dice.com property remained a strong stand-alone business until it was acquired for approximately $200 million in 2005.

Susie Stephens, now a Principal Reserach Scientist at Eli Lilly, joined Oracle in 2002 to lead the development of the database, middleware and collaboration tools, to further enhance their capabilities as a powerful infrastructure platform and analytical engine for drug discovery and development. As such, she was heavily involved in providing support for RDF within the Oracle Database. She now guides Oracle in its continued adoption of Semantic Web technologies, and represents Oracle in discussions with W3C regarding standards in this area.Sisie is chair of W3C s Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group, and coordinates the BioRDF task within the W3C Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group. She has presented at a number of Semantic Web conferences that include Semantic Technologies 2006, and World Wide Web Conference 2006; and has written articles on the Semantic Web that have been published in IEEE Intelligent Systems and the Journal of Web Semantics. ie worked at Sun Microsystems for many years prior to joining Oracle, and now Eli Lilly.

Jamie Taylor is the Minister of Information at Metaweb Technologies, where he tends to Data Gardening and Community Building. His interest in large scale, non-relational data stores grew while managing Enterprise Software projects which used Dynamic Object patterns in his role as CTO and VP Engineering at DETERMINE Software (now a part of Selectica.) He was the founder of one of San Francisco's first ISP's and has a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Behavioral Economics.

Jon Udell is an author, information architect, software developer, and new media innovator. His 1999 book, Practical Internet Groupware, helped lay the foundation for what we now call social software. Udell has been a software developer at Lotus, was BYTE Magazine's executive editor and Web maven, and has worked as an independent consultant.

A hands-on thinker, Udell's analysis of industry trends has always been informed by his own ongoing experiments with software, information architecture, and new media.

From 2002 to 2006 he was InfoWorld's lead analyst, author of the weekly Strategic Developer column, and blogger-in-chief. During his InfoWorld tenure he also produced a monthly series of screencasts about software, and a weekly series of audio interviews with innovators.

In January 2007 he joined Microsoft as a technical evangelist. In his new role he'll continue to explore and explain a broad portfolio of technologies, both inside and outside Microsoft. He aims to build bridges not only within the technical community but also, and crucially, across the chasm that divides elite technologists from everybody else.