Raphael Volz - Introduction

Work experience: 
  Not much yet. Finished my studies this year. Worked largely as a
  software developer part time to finance my studies.
  Since April, member of the knowledge management groups at the 
  university of karlsruhe (FZI-WIM, AIFB-WBS). Master thesis
  on "Aquisistion of ontologies using text-minig" carried out  at a 
  industrial research labs ( Rentenanstalt / Swisslife, Switzerland ).
  Currently engaged in the architecture of the portal for the
  EU-funded community of excellence for Ontologies and Knowledge
Management
  (ONTOWEB). Also engaged in the EU-funded research project WonderWeb,
  which focuses on infrastructure for and interoperability in the
Semantic Web.

  Interests: Ontologies and their relation to other established research
and technologies (databases, distributed object systems, text and data
minig); also the semantics of formalized languages and inter logic
interoperability (i.e. Description vs. Frame Logics). 


Background:  Chiefly what was taught during master studies: Databases,
Machine learning with a focus on text mining. Participated in software
development in text mining ,web applications and ontology-based systems
(OntoEdit, TextToOnto, KAON Tool suite: kaon.semanticweb.org, OntoWeb
portal)

Contribution:
  My chief contribution to WebOnt is likely to be in semantics, and
  particularly how representation primitives affect applicability,
interoperability and computational complexity. I am particularly
interested whether one could achieve a open, layered ontology framework
that combines ideas from several logic languages, in particular how the
resulting formal semantic will interpretable by inference engines with
different reasoning mechanisms. I want to help in ensuring that the
resulting language will
be usable and that complexity issues are at least known to respective
users.   

Short vitae
------------
Born 1976.

1996-1998  Medical Informatics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany
1998-2000  Computer Science / Genetics at the University of Karlsruhe,
Germany
Summer 00  Thesis Project "Acquisition of ontologies using text mining"
	   Information Technologies Research Lab
	   Rentenanstalt / Swisslife, Zurich, Switzerland
since April 2001
	   Ph-D studies at University of Karlsruhe, Advisor: Prof. Rudi
Studer
	   Member of the research groups knowledge management at
		- FZI (University of Karlsruhe)
		- AIFB (University of Karlsruhe)	    

Involvement with web ontologies projects:
--------------------------------
-	TextToOnto (Developer)
	(semi-automatic ontology engineering from web documents)
-	OntoWeb Portal (Lead-Architect)
	(ontology-based web portal for the ontoweb community)
-	KAON Server (Project Leader)
	(an J2EE component for managing RDF-based data)