Judging Panel for the 2025 Semantic Augmentation Challenge
Richard Robinson, Chair | Chief Strategist, Open Data and Standards, Bloomberg LP
Robinson currently serves as the Head of Data Strategy and Standards for the Open Symbology group at Bloomberg LP. In this role, he works globally with regulators, legislators, and industry leaders on addressing data and standards issues to create more efficient and transparent markets. He is also the current chairman of the International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication (ISITC)), a Board Member at OMG and co-Chair of its Financial Sector Domain Task Force, and is the author of two books on data, "Cracking the Data Code", and "Understanding the Financial Industry through Linguistics".
Alexandra Ledbetter | Attorney, Open Data Advocate, Team Leader, Legal Knowledge Engineer
Alex is an attorney with nearly two decades of experience practicing in the areas of corporate and securities law and federal administrative law. She is currently enrolled in the AWS Cloud Institute, a training program for learning how to build cloud-native software applications, and she is also studying computer science to give herself the capacity to express her domain knowledge more clearly for computer processing. She hopes someday to build applications that improve transactional and regulatory reporting workflows for capital markets participants. She most recently worked for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's Office of the Chief Data Officer. Until 2024, she led implementation of the Financial Data Transparency Act, a law which directs the Commission and other financial regulators to establish data standards for collections of information and promote data interoperability across members of the Financial Stability Oversight Council. She remains passionate about making financial regulatory data more broadly accessible and easier to use.
Dean Ritz | Senior Research Fellow with the Data Foundation; Senior Research Fellow with the Data Foundation
Dean Ritz advocates and advises on the adoption of semantic data and disclosure modernization to corporate and government clients, the latter through his roles as the Chief Data Policy Advisor with Peregrine, and as a Senior Research Fellow with the Data Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan organization that conducts research and advances practical policies for the creation and use of accessible, trustworthy data.
Dean Allemang | Principal Solutions Architect at data.world
Dean Allemang is Principal Solutions Architect at data.world and author of "Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist." His expertise spans semantic modeling, knowledge graphs, and their applications in AI systems. With a PhD in Computer Science and MSc in Pure Mathematics, he has over 15 years of experience deploying knowledge technologies across finance, media, and government sectors. His recent research explores how structured knowledge representations enhance large language model accuracy in enterprise environments.
Elisa Kendall | Member, OMG Architecture Board & Board of Directors at the Object Management Group; Partner, Thematix Partners; Lead Ontologist, EDM Council
Elisa F. Kendall is a Partner in Thematix Partners LLC and graduate-level lecturer in computer science, focused on data management, data governance, knowledge representation, and decisioning systems. Her consulting practice includes business and information architecture, knowledge representation strategies, and ontology design, and development. Recent projects have focused on use of ontologies to drive natural language processing, machine learning, interoperability, and other knowledge graph-based applications. Elisa represents knowledge representation, ontology, information architecture, and data management concerns on the Object Management Group (OMG)'s Architecture Board, and is co-editor of the Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM), Commons Ontology Library (COMMONS), APIs for Knowledge Platforms (API4KP), Multiple Vocabulary Facility (MVF), and Languages, Countries, and Codes (LCC) standards. She is also a contributor to a number of other ISO, W3C, and OMG standards activities, including the W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL) recommendations.
Ms. Kendall is currently lead ontologist for the EDM Council, for the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) and for the Identification of Medicinal Products (IDMP-O) ontology. She is also on the technical oversight board for and participates in the NIST-sponsored Industrial Ontology Foundry activity developing standardized ontologies for manufacturing. Ms. Kendall teaches Ontology Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from UCLA, and an A.M in Linguistics from Stanford University.
David Kowalski | President, Midas Advisory Services
David Kowalski, Ph.D., has spent his entire professional life showing organizations how best to manage and govern their data. David is the Founder and President of MIDAS Advisory Services, an executive advisory firm based in Princeton, NJ, that focuses on providing guidance to senior Data Management and Data Governance leaders. He has worked with executives at large and mid-sized corporations around the world to assess their Data Management practices and help devise strategies and policies to improve their efficiency, effectiveness, and reliability while mitigating risk exposure. An industry thought leader, David appears regularly at conferences across the United States and is a very active contributing member of the Enterprise Data Management Council, where he plays a leadership role in guiding the ongoing development of the Data Management Capability Assessment Model (DCAM). He is the author of Holistic Data Governance, a series of books addressing the creation of tightly integrated Data Management and Data Governance initiatives that work collaboratively to achieve the business objectives of organizations.
With four decades of both hands-on and managerial experience in Data Management, David began working on the software development side before switching his focus to the business aspects of Data Management and Data Governance. This experience has convinced him that if the fundamentals of your approach are not firmly established, all the fancy technology in the world will only give you more garbage at an ever-increasing rate of speed.
When David is not writing or talking about Data Governance, you'll likely find him hiking up a mountain somewhere or else spending time at home with his wife, his ever-expanding library and his clowder of rescue cats!
You can contact David at [email protected].