Introduction: Ora Lassila from Nokia

I am a Research Fellow at the Nokia Research Center (NRC) in 
Burlington, Massachusetts. I am a member of NRC's Agent Technology 
group which focuses on agent technologies and applications to 
ubiquitous computing. I founded the group in 1998 but do not manage 
it any more (in order to have more time for things like WebOnt). In 
my ample spare time I also "moonlight" as the Chief Scientist for 
Nokia Venture Partners, a US$650M venture capital fund :-)

Before the Agent Technology group, I was Nokia's visiting scientist 
at MIT/LCS, working with W3C where I started the RDF project. I was a 
member of both original RDF working groups and helped edit the Model 
& Syntax specification.

Before joining Nokia I was a Project Manager at the Robotics 
Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, and before that a Research 
Scientist at the Helsinki University of Technology. My background 
(academic and otherwise) is in programming languages, object-oriented 
systems, frame-based representation, automated planning and 
scheduling, and the applications of these to large-scale industrial 
production and logistics problems.

Currently, I am also a member of the DAML Joint Committee, the DAML-S 
Services Coalition, and the W3C RDF Core WG (as Nokia's alternate 
member). My interest in the WebOnt is to see the work we did in 
DAML+OIL to "go further" and become an industry standard. Since I am 
also the creator of NRC's open source RDF and DAML toolkit called 
Wilbur (http://purl.org/net/wilbur/) I want to make sure that we will 
have a version that supports whatever is the current state of WebOnt 
and RDF Core.

My home page is at http://www.lassila.org/

Here's some airport info:

<apt:Airport rdf:about="http://www.megginson.com/exp/id/airports/KASH">
   <apt:icao>KASH</apt:icao>
   <apt:name>Nashua / Boire Field, NH, United States </apt:name>
   <apt:latitude>42-47N</apt:latitude>
   <apt:longitude>071-31W</apt:longitude>
</apt:Airport>

(so here's a question: what do we really mean by "nearest airport"? 
This one is nearest to my house, but there is no scheduled airline 
traffic, so it cannot be used for trip planning; KMHT would be the 
closest "real" airport to my house, and KBOS would be the closest to 
my office - no, wait, that would be KBED but traffic there is very 
limited :-)

Kind regards,

	- Ora

-- 
Ora Lassila  mailto:daml@lassila.org  http://www.lassila.org/
Research Fellow, Nokia Research Center

Received on Saturday, 10 November 2001 10:58:23 UTC