Werner Kuhn is a professor of Geoinformatics at the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, Germany, where he teaches Geographic Information Science and Cartography. He leads MUSIL (the MUenster Semantic Interoperability Lab), a group of two dozen researchers working on semantic interoperability problems in the semantic and social web. Since 2002, this group has been establishing foundations for Semantic Reference Systems. Werner has published on topics ranging from human-computer interaction through interoperability standards to geospatial semantics.

Werner Kuhn is a co-founder of the COSIT conference series and of the Vespucci Initiative for Advancing Geographic Information Science, organizing annual summer institutes and specialist meetings. He is a partner of Geospatial Partners, an international group of consultants in geospatial information and spatial data infrastructures.

From 1991 to 1996, Werner worked as a research associate in the Department of Geoinformation at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna), in the group of Andrew Frank. Previously, he had been a post-doctoral researcher in the US National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) at the University of Maine.
Werner holds a Diploma from ETH Zurich in Surveying Engineering (Dipl. Ing. ETH, 1982), got his doctorate from ETH Zurich with a thesis on sketch-based geometric modeling (in 1989), and his Venia Legendi (Habilitation) in Geographic Information Science from the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna, 1995).

Werner was an Austrian delegate to CEN TC 287 on Geographic Information (from 1992 to 1995), an elected member of the Council of AGILE (Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe, from 1998 to 2002), the Technical Director for Europe of the Open GIS Consortium (from 1998 to 2001), and the International Representative of the Research Management Committee of the Canadian GEOIDE network (from 2001 to 2003).

Werner is a member of several editorial boards of peer reviewed international journals, and chaired the GIScience conference in 2006. He has been prime investigator for the University of Münster on many projects funded by the European Commission, including GIPSIE (OpenGIS in Europe), BRIDGE-IT (interoperable GI services), ACE-GIS (service chaining), SWING (semantic web technology for GI services), and GIS4EU (schema translation for INSPIRE), as well as on several German Science Foundation (DFG) and German Ministry of Science (BMBF) projects. He has been a consultant for GI providers in Europe, for GIS vendors in the US and Europe, and for government organizations in Germany, Austria, Spain, and Switzerland. He was the scientific advisor and technical designer of the North-Rhine Westphalia Spatial Data Infrastructure.

Werner has held several visiting scientist positions, at the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Maine (from September 1984 to August 1985), at the University of California at San Diego (from October 2002 to April 2003), and at the British National e-Science Center in Edinburgh (from January 2007 to February 2008). He received several best paper awards and, in 2004, the Education Award of the University of Muenster.