He obtained his PhD (Dr.-Ing.) in 2008 at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics under the supervision of Gerhard Weikum. In his thesis, Fabian developed inter alia the YAGO-Ontology, one of the largest public ontologies. For his thesis, he was awarded the degree "summa cum laude", the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max-Planck Society, and a honorable mention of the SIGMOD dissertation award. YAGO gave rise to the YAGO-NAGA project, on which more than a dozen researchers work on key questions of semantics.
As a postdoc, Fabian spent one year at Microsoft Research Search Labs in Silicon Valley, reporting to Rakesh Agrawal. He worked on the Bing search engine and on product extraction from the Web. He went on to work with the WebDam team at INRIA Saclay/France, reporting to Serge Abiteboul. At INRIA, he worked on Ontology Matching and Ontology Watermarking. He also taught classes on the Semantic Web, Information Extraction and Knowledge Representation at the École nationale supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris.
Since 2012, he is heading the Otto Hahn Research Group "Ontologies" at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics/Germany. This group is financed through the Otto Hahn Group Award, a special distinction by the Max-Planck Society that Fabian was awarded in addition to the Otto Hahn Medal. Fabian has published around 30 scientific articles, among others in ISWC, VLDB, SIGMOD, WWW, CIKM, ICDE, and SIGIR, and is a first author in one third of them. His paper on YAGO has more than 500 citations. He reviews for several conferences and journals, including ACL, EDBT, WSDM, WWW, TKDE, TODS, AIJ, JWS, and AAAI. In November 2012, Fabian spent 3 weeks in Senegal to teach pro bono at three universities.
Fabian speaks all major western European languages (at varying degrees of imperfection), enjoys singing in a choir, and teaches dancing classes.
Fabian was a postdoc at Microsoft Research Search Labs in Silicon Valley, reporting to Rakesh Agrawal. He worked on the Bing search engine and on product extraction from the Web. He went on to work with the WebDam team at INRIA Saclay/France, reporting to Serge Abiteboul. At INRIA, he worked on Ontology Matching and Ontology Watermarking. He also taught classes on the Semantic Web, Information Extraction and Knowledge Representation at the École nationale supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris.
Fabian has published around 30 scientific articles, among others in ISWC, VLDB, SIGMOD, WWW, CIKM, ICDE, and SIGIR, and is a first author in one third of them. His paper on YAGO has more than 500 citations. He reviews for several conferences and journals, including ACL, EDBT, WSDM, WWW, TKDE, TODS, AIJ, JWS, and AAAI. In November 2012, Fabian spent 3 weeks in Senegal to teach pro bono at three universities.