Semantic Data Europe 2025

Cathy is architecting the data across Ofcom, the UK's communications regulator, providing guidance on the what, who and how of data management and analytics, of which data models, taxonomies and ontologies play a central role. She has twenty years' experience in knowledge engineering, ontology development and data architecture, both in the private and public sectors through varied roles including as a multimedia research engineer in the telecoms industry, leading research into geospatial ontology development at Ordnance Survey, and as a link data architect at Oxford University Press, operationalising taxonomy tagging through natural language processing. She holds a doctorate in Information Engineering from the University of Oxford, is a DAMA Certified Data Management Professional and is the author of a book on geospatial semantics.

More recently she has been focused on getting data "AI ready", through cataloguing and metadata management, working with domain experts in online safety; electromagnetic spectrum management; mobile and broadband networks; and broadcast and streaming media, to bridge the gap between knowledge and data, using taxonomies to establish common understanding in Ofcom's regulatory areas.