Michael Personick: Michael Personick has been a professional software engineer since 1995 with an exclusive focus on Semantic Web technologies since 2003. Michael’s early career focused on applied research and development for the Intelligence Community. In 2003 while working at SAIC, Michael began to focus on applying Semantic Web technologies to support the federation and semantic alignment of heterogeneous data sets at very large scale for the IC. In 2006, Michael co-founded SYSTAP, LLC, and the open-source project bigdata®, a pure-Java, horizontally-scaled RDF database. Michael is co-owner of SYSTAP, which offers support and commercial licensing for bigdata®. Michael is an expert Java developer, with professional experience starting with JDK 1.0 in 1996 and spanning his entire career. Michael has undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Virginia. Michael is an avid and experienced rock-climber, focusing mainly on difficult single-pitch sport climbing.

Bryan Thompson: Bryan has over twenty-five years of experience in applied research and development, mostly in small business or government. Before founding SYSTAP, Bryan was a Systems Architect with Science Applications International, Corp. Bryan’s work recently has been focused on assessing and applying Semantic Web technologies to support federated data for the Intelligence Community’s information sharing environment. Other areas of technical expertise include REST architecture, information architecture (topic maps, RDF, XML), workflow, content classification, natural language processing, common sense reasoning, object databases, and adaptive learning techniques (neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc.). Bryan participates in a variety of open source projects and is the founder of the CognitiveWeb, an open source project devoted to infrastructure for collaboration and critical thinking. Bryan was a member on the XML Topic Maps authoring group, the W3C Data Access Working group, which is developing the SPARQL query language and protocol, and the W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group. Bryan was a member of the W3C advisory committee from 2003 through 2005. Bryan was a recipient of the SBIR award for technical excellence during his tenure with Cognitive Technologies, Inc. Bryan was a co-founder and president of GlobalWisdom, Inc., a venture bringing workflow oriented text classification and processing solutions to the electronic publishing market.

We have many other skills that are not listed here. If you don’t see what you are looking for, please ask. We always are interested in new problems, not just applying what we already know.