Stephen Katz graduated from the University of Chicago in 1980 with a Bachelor's Degree in Social Science. He has over 20 years of experience in information technology and knowledge management, which has culminated in his current responsibilities as head of the information dissemination program of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Under his leadership, over the past three years FAO has devised a new paradigm for electronic publishing based on XML concepts and methodologies, which has led to the development of a digital archive of FAO publications. He is also responsible for the FAO web-site, which has over 35 million hits, and more than 1.4 million visits per month.

At the present time, he is actively engaged in an international initiative to develop a consensus on common metadata standards aiming to increase access to agricultural information and to facilitate information exchange between partners. The web-services prototype is an example of how XML standards can be applied to achieve some of these goals.

Mr. Katz is a regular speaker at international meetings and the author of a number of technical papers on the subject of information and knowledge management.