Heiner is a Knowledge Engineer with a specialty in semantics. Before joining OSTHUS GmbH, he worked on his PhD at Siemens AG where he developed a semantic model for clinical information that integrates clinical data with medical knowledge and created sematic models for annotations of unstructured medical data. Heiner has successfully demonstrated how semantic technologies can be used to gather information from various sources such as relational databases and unstructured data such as text or images, in the context of patient data.

1. Why did you decide to do a webinar with Business Review Webinars?

In client projects I learned that semantics can help people to better structure and understand their data. For many people however semantics is still only a buzz word. I want to help people understand the basics of semantics and its role within a data-driven industry.

2. How did you get into the industry?

After graduating my studies in mathematics on graph theory, I worked on my Ph.D. thesis at Siemens in publicly funded research project Theseus MEDICO where we explored, how semantic technologies can help to enable knowledge-based access to clinical data such as radiological images or clinical reports.

Since 5 month I work for OSTHUS as a knowledge engineer, mainly in context of the Allotrope Foundation project where semantic technologies are used to create a shared vocabulary and data structures for data on laboratory analytical processes and their result. As a consultant I further help clients to use semantic technologies in various data management projects.

3. What do you most enjoy about your role?

Most of the clients are new to semantic technologies. I like to help them understand why semantics are key enabler for changing the value of their data. Having a shared vocabulary and shared data structures is the first step towards so many opportunities for usage of data. I like to help them make the first step.

4. What has been your best holiday and where would you recommend visiting?

I like to go swimming and eat a lot of sea food in my holidays. Croatia is great for that and I’ve been there the last four holidays.

5. What motivates you?

I want to bring visions to real applications that have impact and solve business questions.

OSTHUS will be presenting their webinar ‘The Role of Semantic Technologies in a Data-driven Research and Production Environment’ on 21st October at 3pm London/10am New York, read more & register here.