Michael is an excellent communicator and is unusually passionate about training. He thrives on helping clients understand how semantic technologies work so that they can move forward on their own. He strives to simplify. He is patient and meets the client where they are. He taught at the first semantic web summer school in 2003.
Michael knows how to get to the bottom of what matters. Given a complex web of unstructured goals, issues, data and information, he asks perceptive and probing questions. He distills the information into the essential ideas and communicates a clear picture in terms that the client understands. He has used this skill to write two seminal papers in the ontology field and for keynote talks.
Michael pays attention to details and produces quality work products. He goes the extra mile to check and re-check from different perspectives to root out errors and inconsistencies. He takes extra time to make it easy for the client to make optimal use of the work products.
Michael co-pioneered the field of ontology engineering. He led a team of five who created one of the first Enterprise Ontologies. The team carefully studied a variety of key concepts in business enterprises and crafted English and formal definitions. He described those efforts in widely referenced papers that resulted in a new subfield and a methodology still used 15+ years later. He is currently co-developing and maintaining gist, Semantic Arts’ business ontology that has been used in numerous enterprise ontology projects.
Michael has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence with nearly thirty years experience building and using ontologies -- twenty-two of those for industry and government. He has published numerous papers including the first comprehensive introduction to the emerging ontology field. He has given numerous invited talks and keynote presentations at companies, universities, government organizations and international conferences and workshops.