Introduction

Hello Web-Ontology group,

<sorry to interupt the working discussion>

I am a recent new addition to the group (breaking the 50 member mark)
and would like to briefly introduce myself.  My name is Evan Wallace,
and I will be representing the National Institute of Standards (NIST)
within this working group.

My work experience has all been in the area of integrating systems for
manufacturing applications.  In the past, we (my division) have
achieved this integration through the definition of protocols,
architectures, information models, or interface definitions for
exploiting middleware technologies.  I have also worked to promulgate
this type of integration specification through standards organizations
such as ISO; ISA - the Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation
Society; and the OMG - Object Management Group.

This approach has had limited acceptance/impact in industry.  As an
alternative strategy, we are currently interested in the promise of KR
technologies to enable ad hoc/post hoc integration.  My interest in
this working group is along these lines.  The Semantic Web work
appears likely to lead to technology that will: be usable by domain
experts, have good supporting tool availability, and provide
capabilities to support the next generation of domain models.  My role
would be mostly as a user (a domain modeler), therefore I would expect
my participation to be mostly listening and learning, and assessing
the OWL's capabilities against our needs.

Goals we have in participating in the group are: to have first hand
access to the work, to understand the limitations of the language and
issues that lead to these limitations, and to input requirements
(where necessary) for the practical application of the OWL to systems
integration.

I am currently involved in a project working on novel solutions for
systems integration and hope to make use of the OWL in prototypes
developed within that project.  Information and Knowledge Management
is also a new focus area for NIST as a whole, so other NIST resources
could potentially be made available to the WebOnt group should the
need arise (such as to support testing).

Evan K. Wallace
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
NIST
ewallace@cme.nist.gov

Received on Thursday, 28 February 2002 11:14:52 UTC