Christian Bizer is a professor at the Free University of Berlin where he leads the Web-based Systems Group. His current research focus is the evolution of the World Wide Web from a medium for the publication of documents into a global dataspace. The results of his work include the Named Graphs data model which was adopted into the W3C SPARQL recommendation; the D2RQ mapping language which is widely used for publishing relational databases to the Web of Data; the Fresnel display vocabulary implemented by several Linked Data browsers, and the Berlin SPARQL Benchmark for measuring the performance of RDF stores. He takes a leading role in the W3C Linking Open Data community effort and the DBpedia project, which both aim at interlinking large numbers of data sources on the Web. Christian Bizer obtained his doctoral degree with a dissertation on information quality in the context of Web-based Systems.
Karl Aberer is a professor at the EPFL where he leads the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory LSIR. He received his PhD in mathematics in 1991 from the ETH Zurich. From 1991 to 1992 he was postdoctoral fellow at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he joined the Integrated Publication and Information Systems institute (IPSI) of GMD in Germany, where he was leading the research division Open Adaptive Information Management Systems. In 2000 he joined EPFL as full professor. Since 2005 he is the director of the Swiss National Research Center for Mobile Information and Communication Systems (NCCR-MICS, www.mics.ch). He is member of the editorial boards of VLDB Journal, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and World Wide Web Journal. He is also consulting for the Swiss government in research and science policy as a member of the Swiss Research and Technology Council (SWTR).