Rudi Studer (born 1951 in Stuttgart) is a German computer scientist and professor at KIT, Germany. He is the head of the knowledge management research group at the Institute AIFB and one of the directors of the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI). He is a former president of the Semantic Web Science Association,[1] an STI International Fellow, and a member of numerous programme committees and editorial boards. He was one of the inaugural editor-in-chiefs of the Journal of Web Semantics, a position he held until 2007. He is a co-author of the Semantic Wikipedia proposal.[2]
He obtained a degree (1975) and a PhD (1982) in Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart. From 1985 to 1989 he was project leader and manager at IBM Germany, Institute of Knowledge Based Systems. November 1989 he became professor in Karlsruhe.[3] Since then, he led his research group to become one of the world leading institutions in Semantic Web technology, and he played a leading role in establishing highly acknowledged international conferences and journals in this area. Rudi Studer is also director in the department Information Process Engineering at and one of the presidents of the FZI Research Center for Information Technologies at the University of Karlsruhe as well as co-founder of the spin-off company ontoprise GmbH that develops semantic applications. He is a former member of the L3S Learning Lab Lower Saxony in Hannover. He is a member of AAAI, ACM, IEEE, IFIP Working Group on Databases (WG 2.6), and German Informatics Society (GI).
His current research interests span over the main topics important for Semantic Web technology, including knowledge management, knowledge engineering, discovery and learning, ontology management, data and text mining, semantic web services, and peer-to-peer systems.