Ms. Kendall has over 30 years professional experience in the design, development and deployment of enterprise-scale information management systems for communications, high technology, and aerospace applications. Her background includes many years in applied research in knowledge representation and ontology design, information architecture, complex event processing, and knowledge based systems development. She has been instrumental in bridging software engineering disciplines, such as theObject Management Group
(OMG)’s Model Driven Architecture methodology, which provides a basis for automating metadata management, and knowledge representation and reasoning (Semantic Web) technologies. Ms. Kendall is principal architect of a UML-based ontology analysis, development and application deployment framework, and has developed rigorous methodologies for domain assessment supporting ontology development. Her formal training in Situation Semantics coupled with extensive systems integration experience led to Ms. Kendall’s innovative approach.
Ms. Kendall brings deep experience in large-scale, complex taxonomy, ontology and knowledge-based systems development, working for customers such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the DoD, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, SRI International. She represents ontology concerns on the Object Management Group (OMG)’s Architecture Board, and is co-editor of the Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM). She is also an active participant in the ISO JTC1 SC32 WG2 Metadata working group and was a member of the W3C OWL and Best Practices working groups. Recent projects include commercial ontology development for travel, agricultural, chemical engineering, financial services, and telecommunications applications.
Mr. Kost is an accomplished entrepreneur, skilled in Product Development, Marketing, Business Development, and Operations, and multiple successes taking vision to practical concept through successful implementation.
Kost began his career as a legal analyst for the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, where he consulted to the Congress concerning the impact of information technology on intellectual property, especially copyright.
Ten years before the commercial internet, Rob joined Prodigy, initially as Senior Counsel in charge of a patent process that later yielded IBM over $2 billion and writing the earliest privacy policies and interactive contracts with banks, grocery stores and online brokerages.
After seeing the Mosaic browser, Kost left Prodigy to found US Interactive, one of the first internet professional services firms, with Larry Smith and others. At USI, Kost was responsible for strategic consulting and later for general management of USI’s largest and most successful operation in New York City. With Kost’s contributions, USI became a public company in 1999.
After USI, Mr. Kost started Realtime Enterprises, which created ground-breaking products in industries as diverse as education, advertising and travel. Later, Rob became CEO of Portaga, Inc., which offered the first SAAS internet travel booking tool designed specifically for the small business traveler, which integrated with Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Salesforce and a variety of other business software applications. Most recently, Rob is also Partner at Brand New Media Partners, a New York-based video marketing firm.
Mr. Rhyne is skilled in a variety of application and data integration topics, in conceptual modeling and its application to business/IT architecture and in semantic technologies, including OWL, various reasoners, Sandpiper Software’s Visual Ontology Modeler, Protégé, Semantic MediaWiki, WordNet and FrameNet.
Rhyne’s experience includes IBM Worldwide Banking Center of Excellence, where he was CTO of this cross divisional organization, leading architecture project proposals for banks in China, Korea, Australia, US and Europe and consulted with banks in many other countries on IT modernization topics, including SOA, integration, master data management, application reengineering to components, parallelization. Mr. Rhyne was also CTO of IBM Software Group Enterprise Software, responsible for technical strategy for mainframe targeted middleware and tools, specifically CICS, WebSphere for zOS, WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer, COBOL, PL/I and mainframe testing and debugging tools. Rhyne led the creation of XML and web services support for these middlewares and tools and introduced event processing support for CICS. Rhyne held the title of Distinguished Engineer, a D level technical executive rank.
Rhyne was senior engineer for IBM Software GroupWebSphere Application Server, responsible for programming model and tools, and was an active contributor to J2EE and OMG CORBA specifications. Rhyne has a number of software patents and disclosures, including a patent for an application of semantic technology to financial product selection.
Mr. Rhyne has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and specializes in computational linguistics, theoretical linguistics, and artificial intelligence.
Larry Smith is a business creation specialist who has founded, managed and grown 5 businesses whose peak economic value exceeded $1 billion.
Larry founded US Interactive (USIT) in 1994 and as CEO/President, doubled revenue every year for 4 years and created one of the first public companies to offer e-commerce and Internet development services. Among his clients were American Express, Deloitte & Touché, IBM, Martha Stewart, Microsoft, Sprint and the US Senate.
As President of THCG Inc., Larry combined a licensed Broker/Dealer, Venture Capital fund and consulting firm into a $350 million public company and doubled its net asset value within 10 months.
Larry helped transform the $5 billion fine jewelry industry by solving sales, customer service, digital distribution and channel issues with ENJEWEL, an online retailer. As founder and acting-CEO, Larry raised $7 million and knit together nearly 100 manufacturers and retailers with a hybrid “clicks and mortar” operation.
Recently, on behalf of the AAAA and ANA, Larry created the Ad-ID™ system, the UPC for advertising assets and replacement to ISCI codes. His early years were as Director of National Marketing at Long John Silvers and account management positions at Grey, Saatchi & Saatchi, Della Femina, and MVBMS/EuroRSCG agencies.
