Who we are
We are a professional services firm committed to the success of our clients. As such, we hire people who can understand and solve business problems and at the same time are technical enough, and flexible enough, to embrace and implement new technology.
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 "Semantics in Business Systems" and "Software Wasteland". For 18 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.
Ralph Brainard
Ralph has over 30 years of experience in providing the vision and leadership to drive major business transformation programs for small, mid-cap, and Fortune 500 companies in diverse industry sectors, including manufacturing, distribution, services, and government. He has helped clients launch new businesses, take their organizations to new levels of competitive advantage and effectiveness, and take operational and strategic advantage of new technologies.
Ralph’s experience includes work with such diverse organizations as Verizon, Oracle, Seagate, PepsiCo, Clear Channel, Philips Healthcare, MillerCoors, Caterpillar, Ford, State of Colorado, and the Department of Defense. Ralph is a Michael Hammer Certified Process Master. He has an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago, and a BSEE with honors from Lafayette College.
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.
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.
Ryann Faul
Ryann joined Semantic Arts in Summer of 2019 as the corporate office’s Human Resources Generalist & Marketing Manager. Before joining the team, Ryann spent the last 3 years working in Human Resources at Endurance International Group. Before that, she worked as a Marketing Specialist at Constant Contact & was a Freelance marketer for Small Businesses across the United States. She earned her B.S. in Behavioral Sciences and her B.A. in Technical Communications from Colorado State University in 2017. Ryann’s areas of expertise include social media & email marketing, employee relations & performance management, HRIS, talent acquisition, and benefit & comp management. In her free time, she enjoys spending time outdoors with her husband and dog, Moose.
Melissa Mitchell
Melissa joined Semantic Arts in summer 2015 as the corporate office’s Chaos Mitigator (a.k.a., Office Manager). Before joining the team, Melissa spent the previous 10 years writing creatively for local periodicals and technically (with a creative twist) for corporate entities. She earned her BA in English, Creative Writing from Colorado State University in May of 2005 and continues to write in her free time. For Semantic Arts, Melissa dedicates her skills to keeping projects on track and on budget, fine tuning our communications, and maintaining general order and conformity within the ranks.
Mark Ouska
Mark is a data architect and ontologist with over 30 years of enterprise information management experience in Fortune 100 companies, major state government agencies, and smaller enterprises maturing across the billion-dollar revenue threshold. He is a seasoned data strategy expert focused on driving business value through data leadership and enterprise information strategy development. Mark’s industry experience includes Pharmaceutical Research, Retail, Health Care, Banking, Financial Services, Consulting, Criminal Justice, Government Regulatory Agencies, Insurance, Natural Resources, Petrochemicals, and Software Development. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Technology Assimilation from Metropolitan State University in Minnesota.
Boris Pelakh
Boris has over 20 years of experience in software engineering, extensive experience in web services, distributed software, SIGINT/HUMINT, high performance systems. Specialties include, software development, performance optimization, and web services. Making a profound impact on key client projects, Boris has been working with ontologies for over five years primarily in the defense industry. His strength is in marrying semantics with large scale development, and his additional focus areas are development/ production environment set up and diving into Geo-Spatial issues.
Grant Sisson
Grant is a software developer experienced in building for the web with a focus on front-end development. He graduated from Tufts University with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science in 2018, and since joining Semantic Arts, has embarked on a new education in semantic technologies. He's working to leverage the power of semantics to engineer maintainable, user-friendly applications within a data-centric architecture.
Steve Steward
Steve is an ontology consultant with 15 years of ontology development experience. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Syracuse University. Steve has produced semantic solutions in healthcare, material science, finance, oil and gas, and aerospace and defense. He has developed customizable natural language generation templates, methods for structuring multiple queries in extended inquiries, and a general semantics for gradable adjectives that enabled an automated reasoner to prove that 50 mph is slow for the highway but fast for a school zone, and 5 ft is tall for an eight-year-old but short for an adult.
Meika Ungricht
Meika Ungricht has been working with data and information for over fifteen years. After studying music and linguistics as an undergraduate at University of Oklahoma in Norman, she furthered her studies in library and information science at Indiana University, Bloomington, with an emphasis on metadata and information retrieval. She has over ten years of experience working at the enterprise level on semantic development projects, ranging from the development of governance over multiple communities of interest to overseeing the implementation of a semantic architecture within a legacy relational database environment. Her strongest skills are in knowledge elicitation and ontology modeling, but her experience in governance and implementation make her a great asset for exploratory projects.
Michael F. 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.
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!
Rebecca Younes
Rebecca Younes is an ontologist and software developer with over 20 years of experience in both academia and the private sector. With an academic background in linguistics, including a BA from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities 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 an open source semantic web application that facilitates networking among researchers in the health sciences, she was captivated by the potential of ontology-based models to connect, create, and provide meaning to data. Rebecca’s further work in semantic technology includes designing and building ontologies in the financial services and bibliographic domains, implementing conversion algorithms to migrate legacy bibliographic data to RDF, and presenting workshops and conference papers on modeling principles and ontology design patterns.
Rebecca Younes
Rebecca Younes is an ontologist and software developer with over 20 years of experience in both academia and the private sector. With an academic background in linguistics, including a BA from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities 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 an open source semantic web application that facilitates networking among researchers in the health sciences, she was captivated by the potential of ontology-based models to connect, create, and provide meaning to data. Rebecca’s further work in semantic technology includes designing and building ontologies in the financial services and bibliographic domains, implementing conversion algorithms to migrate legacy bibliographic data to RDF, and presenting workshops and conference papers on modeling principles and ontology design patterns.
Rebecca Younes
Rebecca Younes is an ontologist and software developer with over 20 years of experience in both academia and the private sector. With an academic background in linguistics, including a BA from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities 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 an open source semantic web application that facilitates networking among researchers in the health sciences, she was captivated by the potential of ontology-based models to connect, create, and provide meaning to data. Rebecca’s further work in semantic technology includes designing and building ontologies in the financial services and bibliographic domains, implementing conversion algorithms to migrate legacy bibliographic data to RDF, and presenting workshops and conference papers on modeling principles and ontology design patterns.
Andrea Zachary
Andrea Zachary is an ontologist who loves all things meta. After discovering the infinite possibilities of the Semantic Web in 2013, she expanded her purview to include ontologies and data modeling. Andrea has experience in technical writing, content and information management, as well as complementary interests in philosophy and linguistics. She has over ten years of experience evangelizing change in e-commerce, government, and aviation. Andrea has an MA in English (emphasis in technical communication), a master’s degree in Library and Information Science (MLIS), and a very dry sense of humor.