[SWD] introduction

I am CEO/CTO of Sandpiper Software.  My background includes 13+ years as 
a real-time data processing engineer for ground systems at Lockheed 
Martin Missiles & Space, a stint as software manager for a supply chain 
company that was purchased by i2 Technologies in the late 90s, and CEO 
of Sandpiper since.  I also have an MA in Linguistics from Stanford in 
Situation Semantics, which sparked my interest in knowledge representation.

Sandpiper is essentially a consulting company, with government funded 
research in ontology development and context-based policy systems.  We 
currently have support from DARPA in the networking domain, from the US 
DoD for ontology development, and miscellaneous commercial contracts - 
primarily for ontology analysis and development.  We've developed a 
UML-based ontology development tool that we sell commercially.  It is an 
add-in to IBM Rational Rose that supports import/export of OWL, imports 
UML models as a basis for ontology development, and exports java for use 
in production rule engines (tested so far with JESS and Fair Isaac's 
Blaze Advisor).  We're migrating to Eclipse to support multiple UML 
tools, augmenting it with analysis and alignment features, integrating 
an external RDF store, and so forth at present.

We are active in the OMG and W3C with focus on ontology development and 
business intelligence.  I'm personally co-editor of the OMG's Ontology 
Definition Metamodel [1] with Chris Welty, and also participate in the 
SOA ABSIG [2] and BMI Domain Task Force [3] in addition to the Ontology 
PSIG [4].  I'm also participating in a couple of new RFPs [5], including

  -- the Information Management Metamodel (IMM), which will succeed the 
Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) and include a new, standard ER 
metamodel with mappings to ODM for use of ER models in ontology development

  -- the Semantic MOF activity, which extends (read fixes IMHO) MOF to 
enable multiple classification of individuals for ontology development

At W3C I was a member of the OEP [6]  and SE [7] task forces in the Best 
Practices working group and look forward to continuing that work here. 

Elisa


[1] Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) Final Adopted Specification 
http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?ptc/2006-10-11
[2] http://soa.omg.org/
[3] http://bmi.omg.org/
[4] http://ontology.omg.org/
[5] http://adtf.omg.org/adptf_info.htm#RFIs,RFPs
[6] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/OEP/
[7] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/SE/