Re: Introductions

Hi, here is my intro:


I've been interested and involved in semantic representation language 
design, implementation, and use since the mid-1970's; a few of you 
"old-timers" will recall RLL, the Representation Language Language that 
I did at Stanford during that era, with my then-PhD-student Russ 
Greiner. From the early 1980's through to, well, the present day, I've 
led a team creating the CycL language 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CycL>, extending it -- kicking and 
screaming all the way -- from an RLL-like frame-'n-slot formalism 
through FOPC to HOL. Along the way, our group (specifically R. V. Guha) 
carved off a restricted subset of CycL that became RDF, which I quite 
sagely told him, at the time, would never catch on and lead to anything.


My main interest is in seeing an entire space/ontology of OWL versions, 
of which OWL 1.1 is of course one instance, where "useful" here means 
sufficient (in expressive power) for some large collection of important 
applications. And by "sufficient" I don't mean theoretically, but rather 
pragmatically. E.g., since there are many applications in which critical 
pieces of knowledge are of the form "Person x believes that there must 
be some organization y which is aiming to block person z from finding 
out that...", one of the features of at least SOME of the languages in 
this space is that they support a natural, terse construct for 
expressing nested modals and quantifiers.


Two applications which speak dialects of OWL that support more common 
features should be able to talk to each other more faithfully than the 
situation in which one of them (or both of them) need to "dumb down" 
some of what they would otherwise express, down to the common 
denominator (most specific common ancestor in the "specLanguageOf" 
hierarchy), which in turn is, however, still a vastly better situation 
than obtains today.


I'd like to help with OWL 1.1, but my "secret plan" is to use this 
opportunity to engage all of us from time to time to keep in mind that 
broader space of OWL languages.


I do not yet know if I will be able to make the Manchester F2F, but 
other travel constraints are making that unlikely at the moment.

--Doug

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Douglas Lenat
CEO, Cycorp
7718 Wood Hollow Drive, Suite 250
Austin, TX 78731

phone: 512-342-4001
cell: 512-773-1709
email: Doug@cyc.com
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