Chief Expert for Knowledge Graph & Semantic Technology in SAP Business AI. I work on grounding enterprise AI in knowledge graphs – graph RAG, KG-grounded agents, ontologies and the RDF stack – building on 20+ years in semantic-web standards and computational linguistics.
Since October 2021, Felix has been Chief Expert for Knowledge Graph and Semantic Technology at SAP, within Business AI. He sets the technical direction for SAP Knowledge Graph – from concept toward production – and builds proof-of-concepts combining knowledge graphs and generative AI, including graph RAG, KG-grounded agents, agentic memory and context graphs. He is a contributor to SAP's company-wide AI-Native North Star architecture and still represents SAP in the W3C RDF, SPARQL and Data Shapes working groups.
This work builds on a long background in semantic technologies and standards. From 1993 until 1999, Felix studied Japanese and Linguistics in Berlin, Nagoya (Japan) and Tokyo. From 1999 he worked in the Department of Computational Linguistics and Text-technology at the University of Bielefeld (Germany), where he finished his PhD in 2004, on the integration of heterogeneous linguistic resources using XML-based (e.g. linguistic corpora) and RDF-based (e.g. lexica, conceptual models) representations.
Felix joined the W3C in 2005 to work in the Internationalization Activity until March 2009. In 2012 he rejoined the W3C team as a fellow on behalf of DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), where he led German and European AI innovation projects. He was co-chair of the EU-sponsored MultilingualWeb-LT (MLW-LT) Working Group and co-editor of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 specification, and coordinated several EU projects: MLW-LT, LIDER and FREME.
In 2017, Felix left DFKI & W3C and joined LambdaWerk to work on XML in the managed health care sector. He then moved to Cornelsen Verlag GmbH, where he led the knowledge-graph strategy and its end-to-end delivery for educational content – vendor selection, ontology design and a unified semantic layer. From 2020 he worked part-time at Cornelsen while serving as full professor of business informatics at the Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences, before joining SAP in October 2021.
A selection of earlier hands-on work in semantic-web, linked-data and localization tooling. (Current knowledge-graph and AI prototyping happens inside SAP.)