Re: Introductions

Hi,

since 2007, I've been a PhD student at DERI, Galway [1], however, I've spent 
there some time even before that as a research intern. My primary "official" 
responsibility in the last 13 months has been helping with co-ordination of 
the research in the ontology dynamics work-package of Knowledge Web, a rather 
large EU project [2], where I've already met some of the fellow WG members. 
In this context, I've also been involved in the design and implementation of 
a simple ontology integration library, primarily focused at semi-automatic 
integration of light-weight OWL ontologies into more complex ones. Moreover, 
since April I've become responsible for transfer of a relevant portion of the 
Knowledge Web achievements into one of the deliverables of the W3C SWD 
WG [3]. So I have some, though still quite fresh, experience with 
participation in the W3C groups. My "personal" interests (i.e., my thesis 
topic) are related to reasoning (uncertain and not necessarily logics-based) 
with automatically extracted knowledge (e.g., output of data-mining or 
ontology learning algorithms).

My primary contact is this e-mail (vit.novacek@deri.org), you can use also
the office phone number (+353 91 495738) or ask me for whatever other means of 
contact you'd like to use, should the need arise...

My overall expectations are two-fold:

1. Very high-level and optimistic vision of the desired output of this 
group would be a new OWL recommendation that would, (i), build on the 
essential principles specified in the submission documents and, (ii), present 
a knowledge representation language comprehensible, if not directly usable, by 
my mother, or at least by my IT-literate, but not IT-expert sister. 

2. I'd be more than happy to see at least some explicit guidelines on how to 
represent uncertainty in the new OWL version as a part of the final 
recommendation set of documents.

I hope to be able to contribute to the topics discussed within the group 
and assist in the progress of the group where I can. Moreover, I'd like to 
specifically contribute to any efforts related to the second point in the 
previous paragraph, i.e. to uncertainty representation in the future OWL. I 
presume I'd co-operate mainly with Jeff and Giorgos on this within the 
group, since they were mentioned as contact persons concerning this activity 
in the scope of OWLED at [4]. If needed, I'd be happy to elaborate my initial 
views (which are maybe not directly "entailed" by the group charter, but at the
same time, they are definitely not contrary or counter-productive w.r.t. 
the essential issues this group has been primarily commited to). As a kind of 
minor and somehow tricky, but potentially interesting issue, I'd be eager to 
contribute to an investigation of relations between OWL model-theoretic 
semantics and (?lexical?) semantics of natural language expressions that can be 
associated with the respective ontology elements (classes, roles, individuals); 
maybe Anne and/or Enrico would be interested in this, too? ...should the group 
find these efforts worthwhile and feasible besides the dense programme of 
the charter, of course. 

Most likely, I'll attend the first F2F (unless I won't be eaten alive at the 
Knowledge Web final review which directly precedes the meeting :) ).

Looking forward to work with all of you!

Cheers,
Vit

[1] http://www.deri.ie/
[2] http://knowledgeweb.semanticweb.org/
[3] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/
[4] http://code.google.com/p/owl1-1/wiki/UncertainOwl

P.S.: Sorry for a little late introduction - there were some internal procedures 
needed to be undergone before the official nomination of our institution's
representatives in the group... I hope I'll be able to catch up properly with
the so far agenda asap. (namely with the "homework" and workflow issues that 
have been decided and set up by now).

---
Vit Novacek

Semantic Information Systems and Language Engineering Group (SmILE)
Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI)
National University of Ireland, Galway
http://www.deri.ie/about/team/member/vit_novacek/
http://smile.deri.ie/
Tel: +353 91 495738

Received on Wednesday, 24 October 2007 10:43:59 UTC