Management

Irene Polikoff, Co-founder/CEO

Irene Polikoff has more than two decades of experience in software development, management, consulting and strategic planning. Since co-founding TopQuadrant in 2001 Irene has been involved in more than a dozen projects in government and commercial sectors. She has written strategy papers, trained customers on the use of the Semantic Web standards, developed ontology models, designed solution architectures and defined deployment processes and guidance.

With the introduction of TopQuadrant's Semantic Solution Platform, TopBraid Suite, Irene has been leading the evolution of the company from a consulting firm to a software vendor. As an executive leader of TopQuadrant Irene is responsible for daily operations and long term strategy of the company.

Before starting TopQuadrant Irene was a Principal in the national Knowledge, Content Management and Portals Practice in IBM Global Services. Prior to that she was a Senior Development Manager and a Project Executive for IBM worldwide consultant's tools and methods.

Prior to IBM, Ms. Polikoff held IT management positions at Fortune 500 companies where she was responsible for development and deployment of enterprise-wide mission critical information systems. Irene has a Masters degree in Operations Research from Columbia University. She is co-author of a recently published book on software requirements and architecture - "Capability Cases: Solution Envisioning Approach".

email: irene (at) topquadrant.com

Ralph has over 25 years experience in the United States and internationally in enterprise systems design, consulting, software development and methodology development and deployment.

Before co-founding TopQuadrant he has held executive consulting positions at IBM Global Services where he was a founding member of Portal Practice and Object Technology Practice. Prior to IBM, he was European Technology Director, founder and Managing Director of Interactive Development Environments, which was an international CASE tools vendor. He started his career in the Research and Development Department of Hewlett Packard where he designed telecommunications test instrumentation.

As a technologist, he maintains an interest in software technologies for intelligent systems. He is a recognized thought leader in the object technology community. Ralph is a member of the "Intent Alliance", an organization that was formed to promote the value of systems thinking for intelligent enterprises. He is a published author and a frequent speaker at international software engineering conferences. Between 1996 and 2000, he organized the OOPSLA workshops on "System Envisioning".

email: rhodgson (at) topquadrant.comblog foaf

Dr. Coyne joined TopQuadrant to complement its offerings and mission to provide better and faster ways to determine requirements and build solutions for next generation e-business systems. With over 20 years experience in system design and IT, he consults with clients on knowledge-based solutions, the semantic web, semantic technology trainings, ontology engineering and solution envisioning. With extensive experience in business, consulting, academia and research, he deeply appreciates that design and development are primarily about people - that success depends on achieving shared understanding and communication through collaborative envisioning and modeling.

Prior to becoming Executive Partner of TopQuadrant, Inc., Robert was Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer of Solution Technology International, Inc. He co-designed a complete, web-based business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) ‘straight through processing’ platform for the insurance industry. As a certified, Senior Consultant at IBM Global Services from 1995-98, he was co-architect of and a major content contributor to IBM's object-oriented methodology for client engagements, and served as a knowledge management /collaboration expert for the global Object-technology Practices.

Dr. Coyne received a PhD (1991) in Computer-Aided Design while working as a Research Associate and a Lecturer at CMU. He has authored over 30 technical papers, journal articles and book chapters, and is co-author of a recently published book on software requirements and architecture - "Capability Cases: Solution Envisioning Approach".

email: robert (at) topquadrant.com

Holger Knublauch, VP of Research and Development

Dr. Holger Knublauch is well known in the Semantic Web community as the designer and developer of the Protégé Web Ontology Language (OWL) Plugin. He joined TopQuadrant in late 2006 to develop the next generation of Semantic Web tools and middleware. Holger leads the development of TopBraid Suite.

Prior to TopQuadrant Holger was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Stanford Medical Informatics at the Stanford University where he was responsible for research and development of various components of the knowledge modeling tool Protégé including Protege OWL, UML interfaces and interoperability with a Meta Object Facility (MOF) format.

Holger actively contributed to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Semantic Web Best Practices Working Group by developing guidance for building Semantic Web applications. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Ulm in Germany, 2002.

email: holger (at) topquadrant.comblog