Tom Gruber's Interview: "Every Ontology is a treaty", browse full interview at http://www.sigsemis.org

Tom Gruber in AIS SIGSEMIS Bulletin!!!

"Every ontology is a treaty - a social agreement - among people with some common motive in sharing"

	Tom Gruber  
	Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Intraspect Software
	Former Chief Architect, Collaboration and Portal Products, Vignette
	http://tomgruber.org/


Miltiadis: Tom we are delighted you agreed to this interview. Let start by asking you to provide me your general idea on how ontology-driven information systems are going? 

Information technology is like the ocean: a lot of interesting creatures evolve to fill niches, eat each other, cloud the view with waste matte, and die.  All this organic material falls to the floor, where it becomes sediment and eventually the bedrock of the future.  Once things have settled for a long time, industry becomes dependent on the oily mess at the bottom and everyone forgets where it came from.

We have lived through this dynamic with IT and ontologies.  There has been a lot of waste matter and clouded vision, yet most new large-scale software or information systems today start with some kind of ontological commitment.  The modern large-scale server software today is based on XML for interconnect and the relational database as the back tier.  These are now layers of the foundation.  These layers have insulated people from low-level concerns, and allowed them to accept that it's a good idea to specify the conceptual foundations of their systems at a level above the syntactic.
	
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For the whole interview download the pdf file at http://www.sigsemis.org/newsletter/october2004/tom_gruber_interview_sigsemis 


Dr. Miltiadis D. Lytras
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Association for Information Systems, SIG on Semantic Web and Information Systems AIS SIGSEMIS, http://www.sigsemis.org
International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IDEA Group, http://www.idea-group.com/journals/details.asp?id=4625)
International Journal of Knowledge and Learning (IJKL) - http://www.inderscience.com/ijkl/ 
International Journal of Learning and Change (IJLC)- http://www.inderscience.com/ijlc/ 
International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies (IJMSO)- http://www.inderscience.com/ijmso/ 
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ECIS Track on Semantic Web and Information Systems:  http://www.ecis2005.de/semantic.html
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Computers Engineering and Informatics Department
University of Patras, Patra Greece
e-mail: lytras@ceid.upatras.gr
site: http://www.ceid.upatras.gr
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