Sean Bechhofer
Email: <first.last AT SPAMFREE manchester DOT ac DOT uk>
I'm a lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. I've been interested in, and involved with, the development of Semantic Web technologies for a while, including development of infrastructure to support deployment of Description Logic reasoners (DIG); building editors for SW languages (OilEd); and building conceptual hypermedia systems (COHSE). I was a participant in WebOnt, contributing primarily to implementation experience and the OWL test suites.
I was also involved in work providing an API for access to OWL ontologies rather than working at the RDF level. The API has been used in a number of different tools such as Protege and SWOOP and helps to provide standardised access to the content of the ontologies -- OWL ontologies are not just static, but can be seen as objects that offer services. I believe a similar approach to providing access to SKOS sources would be beneficial.
Another hat I wear is as Research Area Manager for the EU Network of Excellence KnowledgeWeb.