Stephen Stead was a founder member of CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model Special Interest Group (CRM-SIG). He has worked on the CRM since 2000 and is one of the editing team that guided the standard through the ISO standardization process. He has delivered tutorials on the CRM in more than a dozen countries, including Korea, Brazil, Greece, Russia, and the USA. He is a graduate in Archaeological Science from the Institute of Archaeology, University of London and has worked as an independent consultant in the Heritage sector since 1991. He is a visiting lecturer at the University of Southampton and the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has served on the CIDOC Board since 2001 and served on the International Steering Committee of the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Conference (CAA) from 1989 to 2012. He is also active in the FRBR harmonization process. He first attended CHNT Workshop 5.

He has worked on Heritage sector data analysis and design for over 20 years and has a number of designs in common use. These include the Integrated Archaeological DataBase (IADB), The Record of Scheduled Monuments (RSM), the exeGesIS HBSMR (Historic Buildings, Sites and Monuments Record), the British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography (BIAB) and the CIDOC International Core Data Standard for Archaeological and Architectural Heritage.