Ora Lassila

Ora Lassila is a Principal Graph Technologist in the Amazon Neptune graph database team. Earlier, he was a Managing Director at State Street, heading their efforts to adopt ontologies and graph databases. Before that, he worked as a technology architect at Pegasystems, as an architect and technology strategist at Nokia Location & Commerce (aka HERE), and prior to that he was a Research Fellow at the Nokia Research Center Cambridge. He was an elected member of the Advisory Board of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1998-2013, and represented Nokia in the W3C Advisory Committee in 1998-2002. In 1996-1997 he was a Visiting Scientist at MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, working with W3C and launching the Resource Description Framework (RDF) standard; he served as a co-editor of the RDF Model and Syntax specification. He holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University).

As a lifelong aviation enthusiast, Ora has flown gliders, built flying and scale models, and taken photographs of aircraft since his adolescence. He started his publishing company because of his lifelong love for aircraft. Figuring that other enthusiasts and scale modelers would like to see similar reference material that he always craves for, So Many Aircraft publications was started to fill that niche.

Ora was born in Finland, but after service in the Finnish Army, college, a startup company he founded, and graduate school, he immigrated to the United States.