Ahren holds a Master of Arts in English and American literature from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  He was previously a Business Consultant for BearingPoint in the Content and Portals Solutions group and a founding member of the Taxonomy Competency Center.  He worked for a variety of client projects in commercial and public services for taxonomy, content strategy and management, records management, metadata modeling, data migration, and business requirements gathering with a focus on Web content, user interfaces and navigation, and the use of social networking tools and processes.

Ahren began working with controlled vocabularies as an Associate Thesaurus Editor for the Modern Language Association International Bibliography where he worked on indexed materials and a thesaurus of over 50,000 controlled terms.

Ahren is a member of ARMA (Association of Records Managers and Administrators) and AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) and holds an AIIM ERM (Electronic Records Management) Master Certificate.  He has also presented on taxonomies at Intranet Week in Boston in 2007 and written a white paper about the use and implementation of enterprise taxonomies.