Metadata, Semantics, and Ecoinformatics Group

Bruce Bargmeyer, Staff Computer Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is Group Leader of the Metadata, Semantics, and Ecoinformatics Group. He holds an MPA degree from Harvard University. He is Chair of a standards development committee--the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1), Subcommittee 32 - Data Management and Interchange (SC32)--and a member of the Advisory Committee for the W3C. He leads research, development and demonstration projects in the areas of metadata registries, semantics and ecoinformatics.

John McCarthy has spent most of his professional life thinking about and working with metadata. Retired from LBNL in 2003 after working nearly 25 years on information systems design and development, John returned in 2004 to add his experience and expertise as a part-time member of the XMDR project. During his careers at Yale University, UC Berkeley's Survey Research Center, and LBNL, John has helped design and develop information systems for public opinion surveys, census tabulations, materials properties, epidemiology records, molecular biology, and supercomputer resources. He has served as a member of several working groups of the World Wide Web Consortium dealing with data and semantics. Throughout his career, John's major interests have included information systems architecture, metadata management, and user interface design.

Kevin Keck leads in the creation of emerging semantic computing technologies, advancing the theory and practice of semantics management. He translates research results into specifications proposed for international standards and negotiates with multi-disciplinary participants to progress the proposals through the standards development process. He is working with representatives of several National Laboratories to develop an exemplar ontology that can be tailored for many use cases.

Guest scientist Fred Gey is an Information Scientist with the UC Data Archive & Technical Assistance (UC DATA) at the University of California at Berkeley. Until 2005, he served as Assistant Director of that unit, which manages social science and health statistics numeric databases for a wide range of research disciplines (e.g. political science, sociology, public policy, social welfare, epidemiology, city and regional planning). Prior to coming to UC DATA in 1989, he worked for 21 years as a staff scientist in LBNL's (then) Information and Computer Science division. Dr. Gey has received multiple grants from DARPA and NSF and has led or participated in a variety of research activities in multilingual information access, digital humanities, social science information curriculum development, and ontology and classification mapping. During the summer of 2007 he was a visiting researcher at the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan and in the fall of 2008 he was a visiting scholar at the University of Hildesheim in northern Germany. He holds a PhD in Information Science and an M.A. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.S. in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College.

Guest scientist Harold Solbrig has been involved in hardware and software development since the early 1970's. He has helped develop reactor simulation programs, computerized newsroom software, specialized query languages, clinical laboratory systems, microcoded disk and io controller boards, operating systems, io drivers, programming languages, terminology systems and ontologies. He has been involved in various aspects of metadata modeling since the early 1990's. Harold has participated in the development of the ASN.1 specifications, co-chaired the Object Managment Group's Healthcare Domain Task Force (CorbaMed), and has been an active participant in Health Level Seven (HL7) and the ISO L8 group on metadata repositoires. He is editor and primary author of the OMG Lexicon Query Services (LQS) specification and the ANSI/HL7 Common Terminology Services Specification. Harold currently works at the Mayo Clinic as a technical specialist for the Division of Biomedical Statistics and Information Siences.

Graduate Student Researcher Anirban Sen graduated from UC Berkeley's School of Information Management Sciences in 2009. He has been working on the XMDR Prototype system since June, 2008, including programming, loading example content, and documenting the prototype system.

Frank Olken is a database researcher at LBNL. For the past 3 years he has been detailed to the National Science Foundation in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, Information and Intelligent Systems Division, Information Integration and Informatics program as a program director. Immediately prior to this assignment at the NSF he worked on the XMDR metadata registry project. This involved standards development for the ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registry standard and development of the XMDR prototype metadata registry. His other standards work included the W3C RDF language standard and the W3C XML Schema Language standard. He has also worked on random sampling from databases. Dr. Olken received his PhD. from UC Berkeley in Computer Science.