My main research interests are in knowledge representation and reasoning, in particular applied to the area of Semantic Web. Concrete research subjects comprise ontologies, description logics and their nonmonotonic extensions and Semantic Web Services. For my PhD thesis I have investigated the use of nonmonotonic description logics for the matchmaking of semantically annotated resources with an application focus towards Semantic Web Service discovery.

I have studied computer science at FH-Karlsruhe and at the Eastern Michigan University (USA), where I got my master's degree in that subject.I worked for one year at the Fraunhofer institution for computer graphics (Darmstadt) in the EU-funded project WIDE on ontology-based information retrieval. Since 2004 I work as a research associate at FZI, where I was involved in the EU-funded projects SWWS and DIP about Semantic Web Service technology. Currently I am involved in the BMWI research project THESEUS where I coordinate the development of an ontology management infrastructure, and in the EU-funded project SEALS where we are concerned with benchmarking ontology engineering environments and reasoners.