Michael Panzer

Michael Panzer is a highly creative, intellectually curious, and versatile knowledge organization professional and expert in connecting diverse user groups to highly relevant information resources.

Michael has 10+ years experience in design, maintenance, and application of universal web-scale classifications, taxonomies, and other controlled vocabularies. He has successfully created solutions with cutting edge semantic web technology (RDF, SPARQL, OWL, Linked Data) and the foundational XML tool stack (XSLT, XQuery), and has managed editing and publication of structured content on a large scale.

Michael is the former 10th editor-in-chief of the Dewey Decimal Classification (dewey.org/webdewey), one of the most widely applied knowledge organization standards on the planet. The DDC is used by over 200,000 libraries and information centers in 135 countries, and has been applied to 25+ million information resources accessible, e.g., through worldcat.org. He was instrumental in moving Dewey away from a pure classifier resource and making it useful as a tool for regular information seekers.

With his background being in both information science and the humanities, he tries to tackle every problem from the perspective of a philosopher and a technologist at the same time.