Alumni
These are some of the people who have helped make Semantic Arts what it is today. They are all intelligent, committed, accomplished and fun to work with.
Here they are in approximately the order of their Semantic Arts experience.
Simon Hoare
“The other Simon,” as we now call him, was one of our first hires at Velocity, the predecessor to Semantic Arts. He joined Semantic Arts and worked on most of our early projects including World Minerals, Labor and Industries, and LSIA.
Simon is an elegant developer. He can spend hours with his feet on the desk, then turn out a simple, clean and bug-free implementation of whatever he was working on. The Velocity server ran for over a decade and was ported to other operating systems without a hitch as far as we know. He was instrumental in our early work on security, and spent a great deal of time on XACML and helping us understand the relationship of Rules to Roles in authorization. He built a tool we called the “Project Editor” that interrogated a database catalog, built a model and then provided a guided choice user interface that allowed analysts to define projections from the database that created both the WSDL Web Service interface as well as the code to access the database.
Simon is now the Senior SOA Architect at AgileLayer.
Mark Johnson
“MJ” also was a holdover from Velocity. One of the very early XML gurus, he is the author of “XML for the absolute beginner” which stunned our VC due diligence team who came out to interrogate us on our XML strategy armed with MJ’s article, without knowing that he worked for us. At Velocity he worked on a system that could automatically generate “one off” custom printed forms for medical data gathering: it could generate a form that was specific to a client and only ask relevant questions, it remembered the geometry of each form it produced and put a bar code on each. When the forms were read back in (often from fax which skewed and distorted the image) the program read the bar code, looked up the geometry deskewed the image, read the marks and updated the database, with no human involvement.
MJ also worked on the World Minerals project, during which he built the parsing program that read all the several millions lines of code in the client’s ERP system and analyzed their SQL calls. He also built the “skyscraper graphic” that many people have seen in our brochures and presentations. He is currently a Staff Scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information where he is the Supervisor of the Core Web Technology group their Information Engineering Branch.
Jim Reitsema
We first worked with Jim at Andersen Consulting, then when we started First Principles, Jim started xxx, and shared office space with us. Jim worked with us when we were consulting for BSW and Walmart, and was part of the professional services group at Velocity.
Jim worked on many of our early Semantic Arts projects including CO DOT Activity-Based Coast study, and L&I’s IT Application and Database Investment Analysis and LIFT.
He was instrumental in forming and naming “Dave’s summer camp” approach to making life on our of town projects fun. He is currently the VP for Client Services at The Breakaway Group.
Fran Clark
Fran heard us speak at a conference and correctly intuited that he had found some kindred souls. We brought him on for the “Web Facing Service” project at L&I where we were to find a portal solution that would meet L&I’s long term needs. Fran brought a combination of pragmatism and detailed knowledge to this assignment, which went very well for us and the client. Fran then brought us into an engagement with Freddie Mac.
We often co-present with Fran at conferences. Since that initial engagement Fran has become a key subcontractor with Progress Software in the DXSI product offering (he is one of their three or four highly in demand client service consultants for this product). This led to our working together yet again at Sallie Mae, sitting elbow to elbow in an Indianapolis “kanban” line where we would make changes to the Enterprise Ontology and forward them to Fran and his Progress partners to convert into WSDL for Sallie Mae’s SOA.
Fran is President and Principal Consultant of Arpeggio Technology, LLC.
Mark Andre
Mark joined Semantic Arts in 2008, bringing twelve years of enterprise system management software business development at Hewlett-Packard with him. Mark has held sales management positions for HP, Agilent Technologies, and Indicative Software (now a division of Computer Associates).
Andy Killinger
We met Andy over 20 years ago at Andersen on a project for CO State Senator Terry Considine. Andy was my partner at First Principles, where we became Objective C programmers, authorized NeXT developers and Eiffel evangelists. We also became MicroPlanning’s R&D department which led to MicroPlanning moving to Denver, and eventually Andy taking over MicroPlanning.
Andy worked with us on the Washington State Department of Transportation project as. He is the CEO of MicroPlanning International, and the founder and managing partner of Decisive Business Tools LLC, where he developed the software that has powered our web site for the last six or seven years. He is also Technical Partner at My Enrichment.
Kathleen Dollard
Kathleen is a gifted Microsoft MVP and member of the INETA Speaker’s Bureau. We brought her into our engagement with the Washington Department of Transportation where she laid out a great deal of their .NET development strategy.
Our mentor in .NET development, Kathleen is the author of Code Generation in Microsoft .NET. She writes a monthly “how-to” column, “Ask Kathleen,” for “Visual Studio Magazine.” In addition to her not insignificant globe trotting responsibilities as a Microsoft MVP/ evangelist, she is also Chief Technologist for AppVenture, a Boulder firm specializing in model-driven code and application generation. (We built our internal time control system with AppVenture, and according to our cloud-deployed time control system, we only spent 60 hours in the design, development and deployment of this system which we have been using for over a year.) Part of Kathleen’s mentoring has been in the context of trying to show how we could use our own time control application as an exemplar for how companies can migrate to RESTful/Semantic-based systems. She has a blog called Leaning into Windows.
Stew Crawford, Ph.D.
Stew helped us with work flow rationalization on the WSDOT project.
Stew has a keen mathematical mind. After the WSDOT project he showed us how trigonometry could be used in the automatic placement of connectors in our Visio based design tools.
Dan Kilcommons
Dan worked on the project to define an Enterprise Architecture for WSDOT. He focused on how we could begin the process of integrating the large amount of Geospatial information in relational systems (many of the project planning and capacity planning systems are in traditional structured databases) with the graphical GIS data and maps in their ESRI-based systems.
Brian Schulte
Brian joined us for our ESD project where he led, and was incredibly patient through, the Feasibility Study Process. Senior Management was very excited about the result of the project which led to them continuing with the roadmap we proposed despite having no new funding for it.
Brian is currently the Director of Enterprise Data Management at Pitney Bowes.