290 About the Contributors Pascal Francq earned his Master’s degree in applied science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in 1996 and his PhD in 2003. From 2003 until 2008, he held the chair in information systems and in digital information at the ULB. He decide to quit due to the lack of time and resources for its research activities, and join a research project at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL). His main research topic is the Internet: its technologies, its social aspects and its support as a knowledge sharing platform. Since 1998, he has been working on automatic communities detection. He is the main contributor of the open source platform GALILEI and is currently involved in research on XML document clustering and semi-automatic thesaurus building. He founded in 2009 the Paul Otlet Institute, an independent research center in information science. * * * Silvana Castano is full professor of Computer Science at the Università degli Studi di Milano, where she chairs the Information systems & knowledge management (ISLab) group. She received the Ph.D. degree in Computer and Automation Engineering from Politecnico di Milano. Her main research interests are in the area of databases and information systems and ontologies and Semantic Web, with focus on ontology matching and evolution, emergent semantics, knowledge discovery in open networked systems, semantic integration and interoperability. On these topics, she has been working in several national and international research projects, such as EU FP6 BOEMIE, EU FP6 INTEROP-NoE, PRIN ESTEEM, COFIN D2I, FIRB WEB-MINDS. She has been serving as PC member for several important database, information systems, and Semantic Web conferences. In 2009, she is PC co-chair of the ER 2009 conference. Since November 2008, she is the President-Elect of GRIN, the Italian association of University Professors in Informatics. Tanguy Coenen has a broad interest in both the theoretical and practical aspects of technology and the way it applies to society at large. He has worked and is currently working on a wide array of technology-related projects. Over the years, he has developed skills both as a systems architect and programmer. As a researcher, he has been involved in theory building on social software and more specifically social networking systems. Alfio Ferrara is assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Milano, where he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2005. His research interests include database and semi-structured data integration, Web-based information systems, ontology engineering, and knowledge representation and evolution. On these topics, he works in national and international research projects, including the Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. About the Contributors recent EU FP6 BOEMIE (Bootstrapping Ontology Evolution with Multimedia Information Extraction) project, the FP6 INTEROP NoE (Interoperability Research for Networked Enterprises Applications and Software) project, and the ESTEEM (Emergent Semantics and cooperaTion in multi-knowledgE EnvironMents) PRIN project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research. He is also author of several articles and papers in international journals and conferences about ontology management and matching. Francois Fouss received the MS degree in Information Systems in 2002 and the PhD degree in Management Science in 2007, both from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium. In 2007, he joined the Facultés Universitaires Catholiques de Mons (FUCaM) as a professor of computing science. His main research areas include data mining, machine learning, graph mining, classification, and collaborative recommendation. Elias N. Houstis is the Director of Center of Research and Technology --Thessaly (CE.RE.TE.TH.) and a full Professor of Computer Engineering and Communications department at University of Thessaly. He has been a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Computational Science & Engineering Program of Purdue University. He has served as acting and associate Head of the Department of Com- puter Sciences for several years. He participated in several European projects in the area of information technologies. Houstis is a member of several research groups in USA and Japan including ICER - The Indiana consortium for e-commerce research, NSF- Agent based modeling framework for scalable interdependent markets and organizations, Japan - NSF - Global grid computing and environments for science and technology, ICER- Indiana consortium on telemedicine. Houstis is in the editorial board of several journals. Houstis’ current research interests are in the areas of portals, networking computing, enterprise systems, computational intelligence, computational finance, e-business, and e-learning. He has published several books and over 150 technical articles. Lefteris Kellis is currently employed in the Centre of Research and Technology of Thessaly, as a member of the Laboratory for Information Systems and Services of the Mechatronics institute, and a Phd candidate at the Department of Computer & Communication Engineering at the University of Thessaly. He has a BSc in Computer Science and an MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems from the University of Sussex, UK. His research interests lie in the fields of Recommender Systems, Infor- mation Filtering and biologically inspired Artificial Intelligence. His thesis aims in achieving adaptive and distributed Information Filtering using techniques from the fields of Artificial Immune Systems, collaborative and content-based filtering. Sabine Kolvenbach is a senior researcher at Fraunhofer FIT. In 1988 she has joined the CSCW department where she has worked in several national and EU research projects. She has managed the conceptual design and participated in the implemention of the Baton Application and Album. Her re- search interests are social web, web communities, cooperative task management, and group awareness. Ioannis Koutsaftikis holds a position as a network administrator and web developer for Centre of Research and Technology --Thessaly (CE.RE.TE.TH.). Having graduated from the Computer & Com- munication Engineering Department at University of Thessaly, Ioannis is currently an MSc candidate at the same department. His programming skills involve working with Java, PHP, Python, C++, Javascript 291 About the Contributors and are mostly focused towards web development. Ioannis’ scientific interests include personalisation, collaborative filtering, web 2.0 technologies and social networking through the Internet. Christophe Lejeune is a Researcher of Communication Sciences at the University of Brussels, Belgium. In his PhD thesis (in Sociology), he conducted participant observation of the Open Directory Project, a collective voluntary effort to index website addresses. He has also studied the regulation of discussion forums, involvement in free software and social organization of mediated collectives. His current research is focused on trust in mediated collectives and mutual help in (off-line) Linux user groups. From a methodological point of view, he is interested in the use of software in qualitative analysis. In particular, he developed the Cassandre software for textual analysis, as a module of the Hypertopic collaboratory platform. Stefano Montanelli has a Post Doc position in Computer Science at the University of Milano, where he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2006. His main research interests include database and web-based information systems, Semantic Web, ontology matching and evolution, emergent semantics and knowledge discovery in open distributed systems. On these topics, he is involved in national and international research projects, including the recent EU FP6 BOEMIE project and the ESTEEM PRIN project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research. He is also author of several articles and papers in international journals and conferences about P2P semantic routing and ontology-based P2P community management. Nikolaos Nanas (www.lisys.gr/nanas) is a research fellow at the Lab for Information Systems and Services (LISyS.gr) of the Center of Research and Technology - Thessaly (CERETETH, Greece), an associate lecturer at the University of Thessaly (Greece) and a visiting research fellow at the Comput- ing Department of the Open Univeristy (U.K.). He studied civil engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). He received his M.S. degree in Intelligent Systems from the University of Sussex (U.K.) and his Ph.D. In Artificial Intelligence from the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University (U.K.). His research work lies in the areas of Statistical Natural Language Processing, Adap- tive Information Filtering, and Biologically Inspired Computing. José Manuel Noguera Vivo is a lecturer in Web Journalism at Catholic University of San Antonio, Spain. Previously he was lecturer in Multimedia at SEK University (Spain), and also visiting scholar in Multimedia and Social Media at American University of Acapulco (México) and Diaconia University of Applied Sciences (Finland). He teaches postgraduate courses in Blogging and New Media at several public and private institutions. Guest speaker in V Conference of Latinoamerican Center of Journalism (Panama, 2008). Author of the book Blogs y Medios (Libros En Red, 2008), among other publications. Noguera maintains