We are proud to announce that the Semantic Layer Symposium 2025 lineup features industry leaders, technical experts, and practitioners who are driving the adoption of Semantic Layers across various domains.
Dawn Brushammar
Dawn Brushammar Consulting – Knowledge Management Consultant
KMWorld Europe – Programme Chair
(Formerly at McKinsey & Company – Knowledge Content Manager)
Based outside of Malmö, Sweden, Dawn is currently an independent KM consultant and advisor, and a frequent contributor at industry events where she often speaks about tacit knowledge exchange, structured data, and the role of modern librarians.
Dawn Brushammar has spent her 25+ year career connecting people to relevant knowledge and information. Her experience across industries and geographies includes leading an internal Knowledge Management team at McKinsey and Company, building databases for the Oprah Winfrey Show, running research services for a division of American Express, and managing academic librarianship at several universities and an environmental and sustainability research institute. Having earned a BA, MS, and MLIS, she is a data and taxonomy nerd and forever a librarian at heart.
Brian Schurmann Michels
Novo Nordisk – Data Marketplace Product Manager
As a Product Manager for the emerging mesh-inspired Data Marketplace in Novo Nordisk , Brian helps to lead the change towards data product thinking. Bringing in more business focussed metadata helps end users find, understand and re-use existing data across the company. With a background in library- and information science he brings a solid understanding of search mechanisms and metadata, crucial for managing data in a data marketplace.
Brian has led multiple projects in his twenty-year tenure with Novo Nordisk involving large amounts of data, AI and ML components.
Outside of work, Brian spends time with his family and lives in the greater Copenhagen area.
Paco Nathan
Senzing – DevRel Leader for the Entity Resolved Knowledge Graph Practice
(Formerly at Databricks – Director of Community Evangelism)
Paco Nathan leads Developer Relations (DevRel) for the Entity Resolved Knowledge Graph practice area at Senzing.com and is a computer scientist with over 40 years of tech industry experience and core expertise in data science, natural language, graph technologies, and cloud computing. He’s the author of numerous books, videos, and tutorials about these topics. He also hosts the monthly “Graph Power Hour!” webinar.
Paco advises Kurve.ai, EmergentMethods.ai, and is lead committer for the ‘pytextrank’ and ‘kglab’ open source projects. He was formerly: Director of Learning Group at O’Reilly Media; and Director of Community Evangelism at Databricks.
Barry Byrne
Novartis – Global Head of Knowledge Management
Knowledge Summit Dublin – Founder
(Formerly at Irish Defence Forces – Chief Information and Knowledge Management Officer)
Barry Byrne is Global Head of Knowledge Management for Novartis, where he leads their KM Centre of Excellence (CoE), providing strategic guidance, partnering, and Global Process Ownership for KM. This team leads the global approach to get the right knowledge, to the right people, at the right time, for the right decision. Part of this role involves optimizing AI performance with good KM and a human in the loop.
Formerly a senior military officer with 22 years’ leadership experience, Barry joined Novartis in 2020 from the Irish Defence Forces where he led their award-winning Knowledge Management programme and served as Ireland’s representative to the NATO KM expert committee for six years. He lectured on KM and Information Systems in Trinity College Dublin for three years and also founded Knowledge Summit Dublin, a community-led gathering of thought leaders and practitioners from around the world to exchange knowledge on AI and KM for two days. Barry holds masters degrees in both Management of Information Systems, and Leadership and Management.
During his time in the Defence Forces, Barry completed four United Nations peacekeeping missions in Liberia, Lebanon, Sierra Leone and the Congo. He is married to Suzie, and they live in Dublin with their two young boys. In his spare time, he is a keen sailor and loves to travel.
Ben Clinch
Ortecha – Partner
EDM Council – Regional Lead Trainer EMEA/India
(Formerly at HSBC – Global Head of Business Data Architecture)
Ben Clinch is a sought after public speaker and thought leader in data and AI. He is a voracious learner, reads avidly books, research papers and meeting with specialists in numerous fields with the sole aim of learning, applying and sharing the knowledge to help others succeed.
Ben is a partner at Ortecha and has a passion for helping organisations thrive with their data, built upon practitioner experience having held numerous senior roles in architecture and business in some of the world’s largest financial and telecommunication institutions over his 25 year career.
As an active member of the data community, Ben leads the AI Special Interest Group and DCAM Architecture Working Group at the Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Council. He is the Regional Lead trainer for EMEA at the EDM Council with a special focus on their industry best practice frameworks DCAM (Data Management Capability Assessment Model) and CDMC (Cloud Data Management Capabilities).
Henrik Gudbrand Petersen
Novo Nordisk – Data and Context Architect
Global Data & AI
(Formerly at Nordea – Semantic Layer Architect)
Henrik Gudbrand Petersen is a Lead Solution Architect at Novo Nordisk, specializing in enterprise data architecture and governance. Henrik’s work bridges technical implementation with business needs, establishing streamlined governance processes that ensure data integrity while reducing developer overhead. He brings practical expertise in data mesh architectures and enterprise semantic layers to help organizations unlock the value of their data assets.
Henrik lives just north of Copenhagen with his wife and two children aged 11 and 14. When not with his family he enjoys sport climbing or mountain biking.
Lulit Tesfaye
Enterprise Knowledge – Partner and Vice-President, Knowledge & Data Services
Lulit Tesfaye is a Partner and the Vice President for Knowledge & Data Services, and
Engineering at Enterprise Knowledge, the largest global consultancy dedicated
to Knowledge and Data Management.
Lulit brings over 15 years of experience leading global information and data management initiatives, specializing in technologies and integrations. Lulit is most recently focused on employing advanced Enterprise AI, knowledge graphs, and Semantic Layer capabilities for optimizing enterprise data and information assets.
Alistair C.
His Majesty’s Government (HMG) – Senior Technical Developer
Alistair C. is a Data Engineer with nearly a decade of experience specializing in big data and entity resolution. Over that time, he has designed and implemented scalable data solutions that tackle complex challenges across the law enforcement problem space.
He has deep expertise in linking disparate data sources and building high-performance data pipelines.
Piers G.
His Majesty’s Government (HMG) – Product Owner
Piers G. has a background in intelligence analysis in various parts of HMG and for the past five years has been working as a product owner on solutions that join structured and unstructured data for investigators and analysts.
He is excited about the additional power a Semantic Layer will add for users trying to extract insight from data.
Sara Nash
Enterprise Knowledge – Principal Consultant, Semantic Engineering
Sara Nash is a Principal Consultant of Semantic Engineering at Enterprise Knowledge. She specializes in Semantic Layer and Enterprise AI initiatives, leading throughout strategy, design, and implementation.
Sara has led taxonomy/ontology design, knowledge graph implementation, recommendation engine solutions, and advanced analytics platforms across financial services, pharmaceuticals, ESG consulting, workforce enablement, and more. She is an experienced facilitator with a proven track record of leading impactful trainings and workshops across diverse organizations, fostering actionable design and upskilling for business executives, data engineers, and architects alike.
Daan Hannessen
Shell – Global Head of Knowledge Management
(Formerly at International Monetary Fund – Division Chief Knowledge Management & Outreach)
Daan Hannessen has over 20 years experience in Knowledge Management for large knowledge-intensive organizations in Europe, Australia and the USA. His experience ranges from continuous improvement programs, KM transformations, Lessons Learned solutions, digital workplaces, AI driven expert bots, enterprise search and much more. He has a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence and has used this experience for NLP, Insight engines and auto-classification projects.
Currently, Daan’s role is leading the global KM team and program at Shell PLC in the Netherlands. In his prior role he was serving as Division Chief Knowledge Management at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington D.C. and before that as Director Knowledge Management for Jacobs Engineering in Melbourne, Australia.
Kurt Kragh Sørensen
IntraTeam – Owner & Facilitator
Kurt Kragh Sørensen (Aarhus, Denmark) is the owner and knowledge broker in IntraTeam. For the last 25 years Kurt Kragh Sørensen headed the largest membership organisation about intranet, digital workplaces, KM, AI, M365, DEX and internal comms for global companies in Europe.
Among the international online networking groups for global companies he facilitates a group about Information and Knowledge Management together with Dawn Brushammar. Kurt also organizes the IntraTeam Event Copenhagen and the IntraTeam Event Stockholm – international conferences on global intranets, communication and AI in the digital workplace.
He enjoys sharing the real stories about the practical use of technology, so that everybody can have a better (working) life. He writes two weekly newsletters: IntraTeamNewsIC about what happens on intranet, Digital Workplaces, DEX, KM and Microsoft 365 and IntraTeamNewsM365 about what happens on Microsoft 365, intranet, and the Digital Workplaces
In his sparetime he builds and ride mountain bike tracks, veteran motorbikes and loves taking photos of himself and fountains.
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