Company

Gnowsis is a European startup developing Refinder. Founded in 2009 in Vienna, we're building the next generation of enterprise social software. Our wish is to increase the productivity of knowledge workers by separating the signal from the noise.

We analyzed the situation of many people in various work situations to come to the solution designed in Refinder. It is apparent that knowledge work is often a lot of copy-pasting data from one application to another and keeping an overview of a continous information stream. To solve this, we want computers to understand what our work is about, what information we need, and what is relevant. Integrating many different applications and the way people work needs a flexible basis. Our software is based on open standards and the idea of the Semantic Web and the Social Semantic Desktop.

To obtain more information please contact us.

Team

Our management team brings in outstanding experience in the Semantic Web and Semantic Desktop areas.

Leo Sauermann, Founder and CEO

Leo Sauermann is CEO of Gnowsis and responsible for sales and strategy. His Mission is: making information work easier. He is a pragmatic expert on semantic web, personal information management, and enterprise social software. He worked for the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Impact Business Computing, Compaq, and contributed to projects of the World Wide Web Consortium, Eclipse.org, and others.
He envisioned the first "Semantic Desktop", a tool to get a good overview on all your information and finding the right thing when you need it. This idea lead to the NEPOMUK Social Semantic Desktop EU Project, where he and others created a vision for the next-generation software of semantic-web-based knowledge work.
His career started in Vienna as a software architect for startup companies, learning how to make customers happy.
Privately, the believing Christian is married, enjoys netculture and the digital revolution.

Bernhard Schandl, Founder and CTO

Bernhard has been a researcher at the University of Vienna since 2004, and has been actively driving development towards the semantic desktop in the SemDAV and MobiSem project. He finished his PhD thesis in the field of semantic desktop infrastructures, for which he won the Award of Excellence by the Ministry of Science and Research in 2009. He has published numerous papers about semantic technologies and gives multimedia and semantic web technology lectures at the University of Vienna and the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien. He is also an active musician and enjoys playing drums and violin.

Supported by

Gefördert durch JITU - PreSeed des BMWFJ, abgewickelt durch die aws.
Gnowsis is supported by FFG, the Austrian research promotion agency, an institution owned by BMVIT and BMWFI. Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft
Gnowsis is supported and supervised by the incubator of INiTS Universtitäres Gründerservice Wien GmbH, a company of the University of Vienna, the Vienna University of Technology and the ZIT as a participant of the AplusB program.


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