Maria-Esther Vidal is a Full Professor (on-leave) of the Computer Science Department at the Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela, and a Visiting Professor and Senior Research Scientist for “Enterprise Information Systems” at the University of Bonn. Her interests include data and knowledge management, knowledge representation and mining, semantic web, and biomedical information management. Maria-Esther has addressed some of the most important challenges in selecting and modeling sources, rewriting queries, cost based optimisation, graph query processing and optimisation, and benchmarks for federated SPARQL query processing. Her proposed strategies have had significant relevant from the early days of information integration in the Web, in the late 90s, and to the emergence of the Semantic Web and SPARQL endpoints. Maria-Esther has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in the Semantic Web, Databases, Bioinformatics, and Artificial Intelligence. She is part of various editorial boards (e.g., JWS, JDIQ), and has been co-chair, senior member, and reviewer of several scientific events and journals (e.g., ISWC, AAAI, AMW, WWW, KDE).
