John De Oliveira co-founded Semantic Web Austin with Juan Sequeda. John is Product Program Manager of the Hoover's Online platform and product line at Hoover's, Inc., where he is leading the effort to deliver a new platform that will be the foundation of all future online products. Hoover's, a Dun & Bradstreet company, is a leading supplier of business information, including information about over 60 million companies and 65 million business professionals.
In 2006, John co-founded The Cyc Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the enrichment and utilization of the open source portions of the Cyc knowledge base ? the world?s largest repository of machine-readable, common-sense knowledge. The Cyc Foundation assisted in the creation of UMBEL, a lightweight ontology or structure for relating Web content and data to a standard set of subject concepts.
John worked for seven years as a project manager and artificial intelligence researcher at Cycorp, home of the Cyc Project. While at Cycorp, he managed the OpenCyc and ResearchCyc projects from inception to release. Before that, John was the top information technology officer for Fulcrum Direct, a $90 million direct marketer of proprietary children's apparel brands.
John has over 20 years of experience working with information products and technologies. He has a BA in English from LeMoyne College and is currently completing an MBA in Market Strategy from Regis University.