Introduction: Elias Torres and Lee Feigenbaum - IBM

Greetings -

-- Lee says --

Lee has been with IBM for three and a half years. I initiallly worked on a 
research project called Sash [1]. Sash enabled web developers to rapidly 
create network-based applications that integrate seamlessly into the 
common desktop environment using standard web development technologies 
such as JavaScript, XML, and HTML without requiring expertise in C++ or 
the likes. Since then, I have researched, designed, and developed various 
instant-messaging solutions. My most recent work has been with IBM 
InsightLink [1], a web-services based system for creating, editing, 
querying, and sharing structured annotations on any desired target data. 
InsightLink was originally an IBM Life Sciences solution, but has since 
sparked my interest in the Semantic Web.

-- Elias says --

I've been at IBM for my *entire* career (8yrs) engineering software :) . 
My first responsibilities were all focused on deploying 
productivity-enhancing 
technologies inside IBM such as instant messaging, LDAP corporate 
directories and identity management, online meetings and more. A couple of 
years later, I 
refocused my energy on the design and development of Sash. My interest in 
the Semantic Web is rooted on projects that I mentored at IBM's Extreme 
Blue [2]  internship program, in which we initially set out to create 
common data web services using XML Schemas. As a result of these projects, 
I deployed IBM's internal blogging solution in 2003. Now my goal is to 
create the client and server infrastructure necessary to create, query, 
update and remove more than just blogging entries.  I follow all sorts of 
blogging and social-networking technologies and can be found lurking in 
the Atom [3] mailing list. 

-- We both say --

We work together in IBM's Internet Technology group (sometimes known as 
the Advanced Technology group or various other nominal incarnations) on a 
variety of Semantic-Web-based technologies. Many of these technologies 
center around CART, a middleware RDF store that supports distributed 
clients, transactional data mutability, collections (essentially named 
graphs), access control, replication, notifications and revision tracking. 
The other technologies include a distributed dynamic workflow engine; a 
write-once, read-only, metadata rich data repository; a tool to generate 
Java beans from OWL ontologies [2]; and a semantics-aware annotation 
server. We also are developing a compositional, lens-based framework for 
generating user-interfaces to view and edit RDF data within Eclipse-based 
applications using SWT. This framework provides services for the creation, 
registration, and manipulation of editors, views, lenses, RDF models, and 
ontologies. Finally, we are developing a Perl 5 library for manipulating, 
parsing, and serializing RDF data. This library currently supports RDQL 
queries, and will implement support for SPARQL QL in the near future.  All 
of our technologies make heavy use of LSIDs [3] as our core naming 
mechanism.

Our overall interest in Semantic Web technologies relates to constructing 
semantic middleware systems that enable a new generation of flexible, 
data-driven applications. Our application scenarios are heavily influenced 
by the needs of the life-sciences research community in Boston and around 
the world. We're also participating together with Eric Miller in 
activities involving life sciences and the Semantic Web. While many of our 
initial partners are in the life-sciences space, we believe that 
Semantic-Web-based applications have the potential to revolutionize any of 
a wide variety of data-intensive industries. 

While we do not currently have a SPARQL QL implementation (our CART server 
is currently implemented on top of Jena) or a SPARQL protocol 
implementation (CART will implement the protocol in the near future), we 
have significant interest in the DAWG's specifications, especially as they 
relate to interoperability with other RDF-aware clients and servers down 
the line. As we discussed at the Boston f2f meeting in March, we also have 
significant interest going forward in any potential w3c actions towards 
standard mechanisms for adding and modifying RDF stores, session-based RDF 
access, RDF data-change notifications, etc. In the meantime, we hope to 
help the WG towards and through Last Call, and we look forward to seeing 
SPARQL in action throughout the community. 

We know we've joined the WG at an odd time and with possibly the longest 
introduction :) -- please do not hesitate to let us know how we can help 
any actions progress.

truly,
Elias Torres - eliast@us.ibm.com
Lee Feigenbaum - feigenbl@us.ibm.com

[1] http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/sash 
[2] http://www-913.ibm.com/employment/us/extremeblue/ 
[3] http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/atompub-charter.html
[4] 
http://www-1.ibm.com/industries/healthcare/doc/content/solution/974118105.html
[5] Jastor - http://jastor.sourceforge.net
[6] http://lsid.sourceforge.net

Received on Wednesday, 13 July 2005 20:24:59 UTC