Tom Baker has worked standards and projects related to the Semantic Web since the late 1990s, when he helped organize DCMI, for which he now serves as Technology Director and Usage Board Co-Chair. Tom co-chaired the W3C working group that published Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) in 2009 and currently contributes to the community developing the Shape Expressions language (ShEx). He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Rutgers (MLS), and Stanford University (PhD). He has worked as a research sociologist in Italy; as a researcher at the German National Research Center for Informatics (GMD), at Fraunhofer, at the Goettingen State Library, and he has taught at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok and Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. Over the years, he has consulted on many projects, most recently for NALT for the Machine Age (with the USDA National Agricultural Library). Fluent in several languages, he advocates for pragmatically simple metadata solutions that work across multiple languages and disciplinary perspectives.