Re: introductions: Mark Musen, Stanford

This is Mark Musen, Professor of Medicine (Medical Informatics) and  
Computer Science at Stanford University.  I am head of the Stanford  
Medical Informatics laboratory and have worked for many years on the  
use of ontologies to structure the knowledge bases of knowledge-based  
decision-support systems.  My group performs research on knowledge  
acquisition for intelligent systems, and developed and maintains the  
widely used Protégé ontology-editing and knowledge-system development  
platform (http://protege.stanford.edu).  We are continuing to make  
extensions to the OWL facility in Protégé in collaboration with Alan  
Rector's group at the University of Manchester.

I am particularly interested in the use of the Semantic Web as the  
primary vehicle for the publication and dissemination of biomedical  
knowledge.  I am principal investigator of one of the three new  
National Centers for Biomedical Computing awarded this year by NIH  
under the Roadmap initiative.  Our National Center for Biomedical  
Ontology (http://bioontology.org) is developing new technology for  
the hosting, dissemination, alignment, indexing, and peer review of  
biomedical ontologies.  In collaboration with Berkeley, Mayo,  
Buffalo, Victoria, Cambridge, Oregon, and UCSF, we are developing new  
technology for ontology management, and are organizing seminars,  
workshops, and other dissemination activities that will be of  
particular importance to the HCLS interest group.  We are hoping that  
many of our colleagues in the Semantic Web community will be  
submitting proposals to the NIH to collaborate actively with our  
center (see http://bioontology.org/collaborators-new.html).

I served as general chair of this years International Semantic Web  
Conference in Galway.  With Nicola Guarino, I am co-editor-in-chief  
of the new journal Applied Ontology (http://www.applied-ontology.org).