Atanas Kiryakov is head of Ontotext lab (of Sirma Group) - an outstanding Semantic Web technology provider; the laboratory is involved in research projects for more than 80 MEuro. Kiryakov joined Sirma as a software engineer in 1993 to become partner and member of the board later on and found Ontotext in year 2000. His current research interests are in semantic annotation and search, large-scale semantic repositories and reasoning, ontology design, information extraction. He is author of more than 20 articles and book chapters.

Borislav Popov joined Ontotext short after its founding and participated in several projects related to semantic annotation. He was in charge of the Ontotext's participation in several projects, including PrestoSpace and MediaCampaign, concerning A/V archive management and media research. He is author of more than 10 articles in areas ranging from Hidden-Markov Models to Semantic Annotation. Popov is leading the development of the KIM semantic annotation platform since year 2002. His current research interests are massive-scale semantic annotation, web mining and innovative approaches to searching.