In 1989, Prof. Dr. Dieter Fensel earned both his Master in Social Science (Free University of Berlin) and his Master in Computer Science (Technical University of Berlin). In 1993, he was awarded his Doctoral degree in Economic Science, Dr. rer. pol. (Doctorate on Political Science), from the University of Karlsruhe. In 1998 he received his Habilitation in Applied Computer Science. Throughout his doctoral and post-doctoral career, Prof. Dr. Fensel has held positions at the University of Karlsruhe (AIFB), the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). In 2002, he took up a Chair of Computer Science at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. In 2003, after receiving a large grant acquired from the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), he founded the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and became the Scientific Director. In 2006 he created the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and became the Founding Director. In 2007, he established the Semantic Technology Institute International (STI2), which is organized as a collaborative association of interested scientific, industrial and governmental parties of the world wide Semantic Web and Service community that share a common vision. His current research interests focus upon the usage of semantics in 21st century computer science. He is co-founder of several scientific events such as the European Semantic Web Conference Series (ESWC), http://eswc-conferences.org/, International Semantic Web Conference Series (ISWC), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Semantic_Web_Conference and the TourismFastForward (TFF), http://tourismfastforward.com. He has published over 300 papers via scientific books and journals, conferences, and workshop contributions. He has co-organized over 300 academic events, and is an associated editor of various special issues of scientific journals.
He has been an executive member in more than 100 international and national research projects with a total volume of several hundred million euro; he worked as scientific or project coordinator in several of these projects. He is co-founder of the company Seekda (https://seekda.com), a multi-channel and direct booking solution, and Onlim (http://onlim.com), an online marketing tool.
His experience is however not restricted to research, having taught numerous courses at various levels of education, from professional academies and technical colleges to universities and scientific conferences. Topics include: Electronic Commerce, eTourism, Formal Specification Languages, Intelligent Systems, Semantic Web and Ontologies, Semantic Web Services, Web Engineering and World Wide Web. He was in more than 100 Bachelor, Master, and PhD committees and is a recipient of the Carl-Adam-Petri-Award of the Faculty of Economic Sciences from the University of Karlsruhe (2000).
