Manolis Koubarakis is a Professor in the Dept. of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has published more than 140 papers that have been widely cited in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (especially Knowledge Representation), Databases, Semantic Web and Linked Data. His research has been financially supported by the European Commission (projects CHOROCHRONOS, DIET, BRIDGEMAP, Evergrow, OntoGrid, SemsorGrid4Env, TELEIOS, Optique, LEO and MELODIES), the Greek General Secretariat for Research and Technology (more recently through a Research Excellence Grant), the European Space Agency (project Prod-Trees) and industry sources (Microsoft Research and British Telecommunications). He is currently co-ordinating project LEO (http://www.linkedeodata.eu/) which develops tools for linked Earth Observation data and linked geospatial data, and applies them to the development of a precision farming application. Manolis’ team develops the linked data infrastructure to be used in project MELODIES (http://www.melodiesproject.eu/) which studies how to exploit linked open data in a variety of environmental applications. He also participates in Optique (http://www.optique-project.eu/), a recent European effort in the area of Big Data with application scenarios from the energy sector (industrial partners Statoil and Siemens).