Biographical sketches of authors

Carole A. Goble   Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom (electronic mail: carole@cs.man.ac.uk). Professor Goble co-leads the Information Management Group, which she founded in 1995 with Norman Paton. Her academic career has been spent at the University of Manchester. She gained her B.Sc. degree in computing and information systems in 1982, joined the faculty staff in 1985, and became full professor in 2000. Her principal interests are in meta-data, knowledge representation, and ontologies, and their use in hypermedia, information integration, intelligent user interfaces, and intelligent retrieval. She has worked in a variety of application areas, notably medical informatics, bioinformatics, and conceptual hypermedia and multimedia databases. Current work includes automating scientific database annotation, ontology-driven intelligent interfaces for retrieval and data entry in scientific databases, the visualization of ontologies, and technologies for the semantic web.

Robert Stevens   Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom (electronic mail: stevensr@cs.man.ac.uk). Dr. Stevens is a Research Associate in the Information Management Group. He gained his B.Sc. degree in biochemistry at the University of Bristol in 1986; an M.Sc. degree in bioinformatics in 1991, and a D.Phil. degree in computer science in 1996, both at the University of York. His doctoral research was on user interfaces. His specializations are in ontology construction and reconciliation of semantic heterogeneity in bioinformatics resources.

Gary Ng   Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom (electronic mail: ngg@cs.man.ac.uk). Dr. Ng is a Research Associate in the Information Management Group. He gained his B.Sc. degree in 1993 and his M.Sc. degree in computer science in 1995 at the University of Manchester. He recently completed his doctorate degree on visualization techniques for ontology development. His main interest is in user interfaces for knowledge bases.

Sean Bechhofer   Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom (electronic mail: seanb@cs.man.ac.uk). Mr. Bechhofer is a Research Fellow in the Information Management Group. He gained his B.Sc. degree in mathematics at the University of Bristol in 1988, and has worked in industry as well as academia. He has been a member of the Information Management Group since it was founded in 1995. His main research interests are in the applications of description logics, particularly as a delivery mechanism for terminologies, semantic meta-data, and ontologies.

Norman W. Paton   Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom (electronic mail: norm@cs.man.ac.uk). Dr. Paton is a Professor of Computer Science. He obtained a B.Sc. degree in computing science from Aberdeen University in 1986 and a Ph.D. degree from the same institution in 1989. He was a lecturer in computer science at Heriot-Watt University from 1989 to 1995, before moving to Manchester, where he co-leads the Information Management Group. His research interests have principally been in databases, in particular, active databases, spatial databases, deductive object-oriented databases, and user interfaces to databases. He is currently working on parallel object databases, spatio-temporal databases, and distributed information systems. He is also leading work in the development of an object-oriented data warehouse for yeast genomic data and provides database expertise for a number of databases in microbial eukarytes.

Patricia G. Baker   Sagitus Solutions Ltd., Incubator Building, Grafton Street, Manchester M13 9XX, United Kingdom (electronic mail: p.baker@sagitussolutions.com). Dr. Baker gained her B.Sc. degree in biochemistry from Liverpool John Moores University in 1990, an M.Sc. degree in computer science from UMIST in 1991, and a Ph.D. degree in computational biochemistry from the School of Biological Science at the University of Manchester in 1995. She has worked in academia and in the biotechnology industry and is currently the technical director of Sagitus Solutions, a company specializing in knowledge-based bioinformatics systems for drug discovery.

Martin Peim   Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom (electronic mail: peim@cs.man.ac.uk). Dr. Peim is a Research Associate in the Information Management Group. He obtained his B.Sc. degree in 1981 and a Ph.D. degree in 1989, both in mathematics, at the University of Manchester. He spent two years at the University of Kentucky (1986–1988), before taking up computer science. Before joining the TAMBIS project, he worked on distributed decision support systems, automated reasoning, and hardware design verification.

Andy Brass   School of Biological Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom (electronic mail: abrass@man.ac.uk). Dr. Brass is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences. He started his career as a theoretical physicist working on molecular modeling of superionic solids, gaining his Ph.D. degree from Edinburgh University in 1987. He then moved to McMaster University in Canada on a NATO fellowship to study aspects of high-temperature superconductivity and strongly coupled electron systems. In 1990 he moved to the University of Manchester to become a founding member of the bioinformatics group, where he has a wide range of projects in protein function prediction, gene expression analysis, intelligent integration, automated curation, and bioinformatics education.