Thomas Bittner is Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) at Saarland University in Germany. He develops logic-based tools designed to support general-purpose top-level ontologies as well as domain-specific ontologies for the geo-sciences, medicine and biology. These tools are intended to facilitate data exchange and interoperability in these disciplines by specifying the semantics of domain-specific terminology systems in an unambiguous and machine-processable form. He has a PhD in Geoinformatics from the Technical University of Vienna. Previous positions include research fellowships at Northwestern University (USA), Queen’s University and Laval University (Canada). His research interests also include qualitative spatio-temporal reasoning, reasoning about vagueness and uncertainty, and the representation of ontologies using description logics.