Introduction: Rob Shearer/Network Inference

Hello, group.

My name is Rob Shearer. I'm a part of Network Inference, a growing
company dedicated to commercial applications of semantic web
technologies, including RDF and OWL. My engineering background includes
a number of text and query parsing and rendering architectures as well
as natural language processing and content management applications. I'm
responsible for the "core technology" aspects of Network Inference's
activities, and have spent the last two years developing both a reasoner
for OWL ontologies and query interfaces for use in industrial OWL
applications.

I hope that we will be able to contribute the user feedback and client
interaction that we have acquired over several years of system
deployments and customer training. I have found the challenge of
balancing theoretical completeness and language simplicity against
real-life usability to be extremely educational. I hope our experience
of several query language iterations will offer the group insight into
how different choices will impact usage in production environments.

I'm hoping that this working group is able to develop a simple query
language in which true RDF and OWL applications can be built, and in the
process help to move RDF from its current niche in academic and
knowledge-representation fields towards more mainstream data
manipulation purposes, much as XML and relational databases are used
today.

Received on Thursday, 18 March 2004 13:22:08 UTC