Team

President

Dave McComb

Dave McComb is the President and co-founder of Semantic Arts. He and his team help organizations uncover the meaning in the data from their information systems. Dave is also the author of “The Data-Centric Revolution”, “Software Wasteland” and “Semantics in Business Systems”. For 20 years, Semantic Arts has helped firms of all sizes in this endeavor, including Proctor & Gamble, Goldman Sachs, Schneider-Electric, Lexis Nexis, Dun & Bradstreet, and Morgan Stanley.

Prior to Semantic Arts, Dave co-founded Velocity Healthcare, where he developed and patented the first fully model driven architecture. Prior to that, he was a part of the problem.

Head of Business Development

Steve Case

Steve Case has over 20 years of progressive new business development and account management experience across multiple technology professional service disciplines.  At Semantic Arts, Steve takes on a dual role of expanding the sales footprint while overseeing staffing responsibilities with the team of Ontology management consultant experts.  He serves as the primary communication point for customer engagement, resource coordination, proposal generation, account care, and delivery escalation.

His strength is in collaborating with business leaders to understand the business problems and desired outcomes, while identifying and bringing the right talent mixture to successfully find solutions.  This includes accountability for meeting client expectations, maximizing customer satisfaction, and securing on-going, trustworthy working relationships.

Associate Business Developer

Ryan Chandler

Ryan works for Semantic Arts as a business developer and data-centric ambassador.  He spent over 20 years in the Fortune 50 building large-scale analytical infrastructure, leading complex development projects and as a senior data scientist.   His passion is for people and helping humans and machines work together more naturally.  He was led to Semantic Arts by an intense desire to overturn the status quo and deliver on the radical simplification semantics and data-centrism offer.

Currently finishing a PhD in cognitive and linguistic informatics, he is overly excitable about how smart our data can become and the prospect of having meaningful conversations with it.

Chief Administrative Officer

JT Metcalf

JT joined Semantic Arts in January 2022 as the corporate office’s Chaos Mitigator (a.k.a., Office Manager) and currently serves as our Chief Administrative Officer. He earned dual B.S. degrees in Business Administration and Tourism from Colorado State University in 2009, then spent 12 years working in various roles with a local Christian church. For Semantic Arts, JT is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of the company including Human Resources, accounting, marketing and general business operations.

Outside of work, JT’s passions include his faith, his family, and the agricultural way of life. You can often find him on his small hobby farm/ranch outside of town.

Staff Ontologist

Dylan Abney

Dylan Abney joined Semantic Arts as an ontologist in the summer of 2021. Prior to joining the team, he studied and taught philosophy, earning M.A.s from the University of Arkansas and UCSB. In graduate school, his academic focus was on ontology, the philosophy of language (including formal semantics), and logic. At Semantic Arts, he has worked primarily in the energy and commodities industries. Dylan enjoys reflecting on the first principles that guide the design and construction of ontologies, but he is equally excited to put these principles to work and leverage semantic technology to build a more data-centric world.

Associate Ontologist

Doug Beeson

Doug Beeson has 30 years of experience in software development, data modelling and architecture. He started his professional career as an industrial engineer, moved on to science journalism, but came back to the technology fold when Netscape was released in 1995. Since then, he has designed software solutions for organizations in e-commerce, telecommunications, banking, manufacturing, and life sciences.

A native of the Midwest, Doug has lived most of his adult life in French-speaking countries, including 25 years in Quebec, Canada. Besides the French language and the accompanying food, he has a particular affection for the Julia programming language and is determined to see a data-centric world powered by graphs and high-performance computing.

Associate Ontologist

Phil Blackwood

Bio coming soon!

Expert Ontologist

Dan Carey

Dan is an ontologist and data architect with 30 years of consulting experience, 25 of it designing databases, data models, and data strategies with major IT service and consulting firms. With Semantic Arts, he develops and implements modular ontologies for large firms, primarily in the financial industry. In his prior work, he supported mostly government clients at the federal, state, and local levels.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Applied Physics from Georgia Tech.

Staff Ontologist

Steven Chalem

Steven is an ontologist and data modeler with over thirty years’ experience across a wide variety of industries including finance, electronics manufacturing, telecoms, consumer packaged goods, and marketing. Having seen the triumphs and challenges in information technology over the years, he is enthusiastic about using semantic methods and tools to transform and simplify the way organizations realize the value of their data.  Steven majored in Philosophy at the University of Chicago, with a particular interest in the philosophies of science, language, and mind.

He grew up in the Chicago area and currently lives in Northern California, where he enjoys hiking, live music, and reading about philosophy, history, and recent developments in science.

Journey Person Ontologist

Dalia Dahleh

Dalia is an experienced ontologist with a background in software and mechanical engineering. She earned her master’s degree in Information Engineering from the University of Toronto, where she focused her studies on knowledge modeling and semantic technologies. She published a research paper on the use of semantic solutions in smart cities, utilizing environmental ontologies to automate city performance. Following that, she worked as an ontology engineer in the healthcare industry, building IoT solutions that optimize daily processes at hospitals. She also has experience designing software for professional sports wearables.

Outside of work, she enjoys cycling long distances and performing with hula hoops.

Staff Ontologist

Jim Delany

Jim Delany joined Semantic Arts in December 2022 with over 30 years of experience in energy, manufacturing, and healthcare.  His recent experience includes data governance, metadata management, data quality, and data provenance.  Jim looks forward to using ontologies and semantics to bring value to organizational data assets.

Outside of work, Jim enjoys traveling and camping with his family.

Journey Person Ontologist

Justin Dowdy

Justin is a software engineer and ontologist. He has maintained aircraft, developed a commercial/military flight simulator, developed and deployed enterprise information management solutions for Fortune 50 companies, developed and deployed a platform for robotic process automation and knowledge representation in the healthcare space, and taught mathematics and image processing. He is one of the developers of SPARQL Anything which he believes is like the cURL of the semantic web. He uses APL and thinks its collection of primitives and means of composition make it a good model for semantic web ontologies. It is hard for him to imagine doing software engineering for information systems without data-centric thinking.

He enjoys riffing on the questions you can ask knowledge graphs that have employed thoughtful domain modeling.

Associate Ontologist

Irina Filitovich

Irina (pronounced Eereenah) is a data professional with domain knowledge of Drug Discovery and Data Science. She joined Semantic Arts as an Ontologist in December 2022.

Irina is passionate about advancing Life Sciences by enabling Data-Centric transformations and supporting FAIRification efforts in many Biotech companies.

As a Theoretical Mathematics major, Irina enjoys understanding the complexity of a domain and finding ways to formalize its information and knowledge.

In her free time, Irina loves hiking, backpacking, and making ceramics.

Entry Ontologist

Daniel Hadad

Daniel joined Semantic Arts as an ontologist in February 2023. He is a PhD candidate in philosophy at The University of Massachusetts Amherst, where his research is focused on the nature of rational belief. As an instructor he has years of experience teaching formal logic and critical thinking. Daniel is excited about building ontologies across a wide array of subject matters and utilizing semantic technology to usher in a new age of data-centricity.

Outside of work, Daniel loves the company of his family, playing strategy games, and writing fiction.

Associate Ontologist

Ryan Hohimer

Ryan Hohimer is a Semantic Technology and Object-Oriented Design zealot. He enjoys creating object models for Artificial Intelligence applications. Although many domains are fascinating, the cybersecurity domain is a passion of his. There is a huge need for computers to mimic human cybersecurity experts. Ryan has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (BSEE) from Washington State University (WSU). Upon receiving his degree, the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) put him to work in data analysis in energy and national security. This led to an exciting career in object modeling for private sector companies.

When asked he states he’s “living my dream”.

Associate Ontologist

Borislav Iordanov

Borislav Iordanov is an ontologist with over 25 years experience as a software architect, programmer and manager. He is passionate about knowledge representation, graph databases and large-scale distributed systems. His mains domains of expertise include fintech, biotech and e-government.  During a long career stretch in e-government he earned several awards, including semi-finalist in Innovations in American Governments from the Harvard Kennedy School for the ontology-driven CRM system powering one of the largest 311 call centers in North America.

Staff Ontologist

Scott Looney

Scott is a PhD candidate at Syracuse University and has been with Semantic Arts since 2021. Prior to joining Semantic Arts, Scott taught symbolic logic at Syracuse. He has expertise in first order logic and set theory and has published on information transfer in peer-reviewed journals. Scott is passionate about analyzing data for both ontology development and data ingestion.

Outside of work, Scott enjoys spending time with his family, nature, philosophy, and science-fiction.

Staff Ontologist

Heather Moore

Heather joined Semantic Arts as an ontologist in December 2022. Prior to Semantic Arts, she was an ontologist at Amazon, focusing on the retail eCommerce space. She earned her MS at the University of Washington in Information Management, specializing in ontology and enterprise systems, and her BA at the University of Minnesota.

Heather is passionate about linking data together for business efficiency and for creating useful metrics. She likes setting up people for success in their work by focusing on data-centric solutions and data interconnectivity.

Staff Ontologist

Jessica Singer

Jess started with Semantic Arts as an Entry Ontologist in summer of 2021. She is a passionate ontologist with experience building multilingual ontologies for food traceability and provenance. She earned her degree in Bioresource Engineering from McGill University where she developed her passion for valorizing waste data and streamlining code through the use of ontologies.

When she is not working with ontologies you can find her on the cross country ski trails around Montréal and conquering 160 km ski marathons.

Expert Ontologist

Michael Uschold, PhD

Michael Uschold is an internationally recognized expert with over two decades experience in developing and transitioning semantic technology from academia to industry. He received his Ph.D. in AI from Edinburgh University in 1991 and an MSc. from Rutgers University in Computer Science in 1982. He pioneered the field of ontology engineering, co-authoring the first paper and giving the first tutorial on the topic in 1995 (in London). This leveraged the work he did in creating the influential “Enterprise Ontology”.

Michael is a senior ontology consultant at Semantic Arts, training and guiding clients to better understand and leverage semantic technology while he builds their commercial enterprise ontologies.

Expert Ontologist

Mark Wallace

Mark is an ontologist and software architect/developer with over 30 years of experience designing and building software and data-centric systems for government and commercial clients. He got into the Semantic Web in 2004, and his experience ranges from pure ontology development to large scale RDF applications with billions of triples. Mark has been an author and invited speaker in the Semantic Web community since 2009. With Semantic Arts, Mark gets to apply a broad range of skills including ontology modeling, software development, and project management.

Mark holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida. Go Knights!

Senior Ontologist

Peter Winstanley, PhD

Peter is an ontologist in the Semantic Arts team. He has a diverse background with experience in medical research, government, and in standards development. He was a contributor to the W3C “Data on the Web Best Practices” recommendation and an editor of the W3C “Data Catalog” vocabulary recommendation. A former interoperability specialist with the UK Government Linked Data and Data Architects’ Working Groups and the European Commission “Joinup” semantic technologies community, he is currently co-Chair of the W3C Dataset Exchange Working Group.

Senior Ontologist

Rebecca Younes

Rebecca Younes is an ontologist and software developer with 25 years of experience in both academia and the private sector. With an academic background in linguistics, including a BA from the University of Minnesota and an MA from the University of Texas at Austin, Rebecca began her career in multilingual text-to-speech software development. With her first exposure to semantic technology, as a contributing developer to VIVO, an open source semantic web application that facilitates networking among health science researchers, she was captivated by the potential of semantic models and knowledge graphs to connect, create, and provide meaning to data. Rebecca’s subsequent work in semantic technology includes designing and building ontologies in a broad range of sectors, including financial services; libraries, museums, and rare book archives; HVAC; digital humanities; and professional services.

In her free time, Rebecca enjoys road cycling, reading, and language learning.

Entry Semantic Developer

Colton Glasgow

Colton joined Semantic Arts as an Entry Semantic Developer in January of 2023. He started working at a young age on the hardware side of IT, building custom computers and fixing any issue you could think of for customers. He made a transition from hardware to software and moved to a cyber security startup where he was introduced to software development and RDF. While working in the cyber security industry Colton utilized semantic technology to help companies deal with risk, growing his passion for RDF and OWL. He has a general curiosity about everything, a passion for learning, and trying new things.

Colton grew up in eastern Washington and moved to Coeur d’Alene Idaho to be closer to the mountains. In his free time he enjoys skiing, backpacking, adventure biking, and climbing (in that order or all together).

Lead Data-Centric Developer

Jamie Gulden

Jamie Gulden is a software developer for Semantic Arts and has been part of the team since 2018. Prior to joining Semantic Arts he helped start and worked for several software startups.

Entry Semantic Developer

Shawn Goodwin

Shawn Goodwin is a software developer who joined Semantic Arts in the winter of 2020. At Semantic Arts he helps develop the Data-Centric Architecture and the Model Driven user interface. Before coming to Semantic Arts, Shawn worked in library metadata, contributed to resource description, and supported the management of a large taxonomy. But primarily, he worked on integrating different siloed systems. He jumped at the chance to leverage semantic technology to support Semantic Arts in tearing down application silos.

When he isn’t marshalling computer languages to solve problems around knowledge organization, he spends his time in the Colorado mountains or reading ancient history.

Entry Semantic Developer

Neil Graham

Neil Graham is a software developer who joined Semantic Arts in 2018. Found his passion in life through reading biographies, and during that time also found the motivation to teach himself programming. On a whim moved from NJ to Fort Collins, CO to work at the CSU Tree Sappling Nursery. While developing on the side, found Semantic Arts and became obsessed with the simplicity with which data can be represented and accessed. He is now working on an open-source RDF library [rdfhash](https://github.com/NeilGraham/rdfhash) which aims to quickly resolve Blank Nodes subjects into a hash of its triples.

Staff Semantic Developer

Danny Hurlburt

Danny Hurlburt is a software developer who joined Semantic Arts in the summer of 2020. At Semantic Arts he helps develop the Data-Centric Architecture and various web applications. For the 15 years prior to coming to Semantic Arts, he worked with several companies developing web applications.

Entry Semantic Developer

Eddie Thomas

Eddie was a traditional software developer in college. After graduating in 2021 he started at Semantic Arts and has since become a full stack developer, trained in the arts of semantics.