"List of Companies and Organizations Potentially Interested in a W3C Semantic Web Rules Standard " by Prof. Benjamin Grosof, M.I.T. Sloan School of Management bgrosof@mit.edu ; http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof Goals of developing this list and document: 1. aid exploring and marshaling W3C membership support for formation of Rules Working Group within the W3C Semantic Web Activity; and 2. aid focusing related working-group charter scope etc. discussions. How to use this document: discuss with people from the relevant organizations about their interests, requirements, anticipated uses, concerns, etc. wrt semantic web rules. We hope you find it stimulating and useful!!!!! This draft: version v1.0 of Nov. 7, 2003 Draft history: v1.0 of Nov. 7, 2003 by Benjamin Grosof To be posted soon also at: http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof/#SWRulesPotentialInteresteds , part of http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof/#RuleML Corrections, updates, additions, suggestions, and other comments, are most definitely invited!! Outline: 1. Acknowledgements, Introduction, Preface Notes 2. W3 Members interested in semantic web rules 3. Non-Members of W3 interested in semantic web rules 1.1. Acknowledgements This list based in considerable part on the list of RuleML participants, and contacts interested in RuleML, that have been developed in collaboration with: - Said Tabet (stabet@comcast.net), Macgregor; and - Harold Boley (Harold.Boley@nrc.ca), National Research Council of Canada. The other members of the RuleML Steering Committee (Gerd Wagner, Steve Ross-Talbot, and Michael Dean) have also helped with developing those contacts. 1.2. Introduction Here's a list of companies and other institutional organizations that (to the best of our knowledge) we have substantial reason to believe are interested in semantic web rules -- that is, interested either to participate in design of a standard in that area, or to be a fairly early adopter and user of a semantic web rules standard. __________________________________________________________ DISCLAIMER: This document is simply OUR OPINION about who is interested. NO COMMITMENT of any sort by the individual organizations listed here is meant to be implied as having been expressed by them or made by them!!! Note that the individual organizations we have listed here have NOT approved being included on this list -- hence the disclaimer-flavored waffle wording in this Introduction and in the document title!!! Indeed, they have not even been asked to give such approval, even informally (although requests to be removed from the list or added to it are invited as corrections/comments and we will do our best to incorporate them as changes in future versions of this docuemnt). (We hope that's clear. OK, enough already, let's get on with the meat of this document...) __________________________________________________________ Interest in semantically interoperable rules exchanged over the Web in XML, without such necessarily being in RDF, is defined as "semantic web rules" for this purpose. The criterion for listing an organization is that there's some substantial evidence of interest, where that evidence is at least one of the following kinds: 1. participation (by at least one member of that organization) in standardization activities and discussions, either RuleML or Joint Committee or SWSI or W3C Semantic Web Activity F2F's or www-rdf-rules@w3.org discussion list; 2. indication of interest in past conversations (with Benjamin Grosof or Said Tabet) by at least one member of that organization; or 3. participation (by at least one member of that organization) in research activities, e.g., published scientific papers, DAML work, etc. 1.3. Preface Notes In this section we give preface notes about the annotating comments and shorthands below. "[[...]]" encloses an editing comment. "W3C" = World Wide Web Consortium" http://www.w3.org "RuleML" = Rule Markup Language Initiative http://www.ruleml.org (see also http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof/#RuleML for more) "Benj" = Benjamin Grosof "Said" = Said Tabet "(in RuleML)" after an institution name means it is an official RuleML participant; similarly, "(in DAML)", "(in SWSI)", or "(in Joint Committee)" mean it is active there wrt rules. " -- Benj" or " -- Said" after an institution name indicates who knows a contact there. Doubtless, for many of the institutions listed as interested, additional relevant people who can vouch for the contact/interest there could be added beyond just "Benj" or "Said". The rationale to list who knows a contact at that institution is to help with editing and elaborating the contacts in future versions, and to provide a bit of accountability wrt who can vouch for evidence of interest. 2. W3C Members interested in semantic web rules: Larger companies: (in roughly descending order of intensity of interest) IBM (in RuleML, SWSI) HP (Jena etc.) Sun Microsystems (in RuleML) -- Said, Benj Oracle -- have presented in RuleML ; -- Benj, Said BT -- Benj ; (in SWSI) Boeing -- Benj ; (in SWSI) ; (contact: Michael Uschold) Fujitsu -- Benj ; (contacts: Yannis Labrou, Frank McCabe) Sybase (in RuleML) ; -- Said, Benj SAP -- Benj Thomson -- Benj Microsoft -- Benj Reuters -- Said, Benj, Steve Ross-Talbot Smaller companies: Enigmatec (in RuleML) ILOG -- Benj, Said Macgregor (in RuleML) -- Said Network Inference Versata (in RuleML) -- Said [[not sure; Said: please clarify]] Standards organizations (that are W3C members): Oasis (solicited RuleML to organize a Technical Committee) -- Benj, Said OMG (Object Management Group) (solicitations out on rules proposals) -- Said Research institutions: M.I.T. (co-lead of RuleML, DAML rules, Joint Committee rules; in SWSI) U. Southern California / Information Sciences Inst. (in DAML, Joint Committee) U. Maryland MIND lab (in DAML, SWSI) NRC (National Research Council of Canada) (co-lead RuleML; in Joint Committee) Stanford U. (in DAML, Joint Committee, SWSI) U. Southampton (in DAML, SWSI) DFKI (in RuleML) MITRE -- Benj (others too) ; [[maybe should categorize this as a company?]] Military organizations: DoD (US Dept. of Defense) -- several branches (see W3C's overall members list) %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Probable's among W3C members: The ff. W3C members are fairly likely to be already interested (i.e., Benj's subjective probability at time of this draft is over 0.5 for each). [[todo: can we find some evidence / vouching for these?]] Nokia (Ora Lassila) -- (in DAML etc.) BEA -- Said Vitria -- Benj in 1998-2000 Ericsson -- Said, Benj France Telecomm -- Benj (probably others too) Uniform Code Council -- Benj ; (they have a sort of company aspect, too) %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Possible's among W3C members: The ff. W3C members are maybe's; (i.e., Benj's subjective probability at time of this draft is over 0.5 that *at least one* of the following is (already) interested). [[todo: can we find some evidence/vouching for these?]]: AT&T CommerceOne Computer Associates EDS Nisus Inc. NTT DoCoMo Software AG SICS Alcatel DaimlerChrysler 3. Non-Members of W3C that are interested: NB: These organizations are important for a few different reasons: - as resources, e.g., for requirements, usage, or technical efforts - might become W3C members in part to participate in a Rules effort Larger companies: Lucent (in DAML, Joint Committee, ?SWSI) BBN/Verizon (in DAML, Joint Committee, SWSI) Fidelity -- Benj, Said General Motors -- Benj in 2002 Citicorp -- Benj in 2002, ?Said Goldman Sachs -- Benj in 2001, ?Said Pitney Bowes -- Benj Military organizations: DARPA and more of DoD, e.g., Navy -- Benj, Mike Dean, Mark Greaves, etc. (DARPA runs DAML; in Joint Committee) Open-source organizations: Apache.org -- Said (Benj a little too) Standards organizations: ISO: Simple Common Logic committee currently in formation) American Bar Association: e-contracting, e-agents groups (on best practices) Industry-Analyst organizations: These perform market research and provide competitive business intelligence, analysis and forecasting of trends, etc. Forrester -- Benj IDT -- Benj ?Gartner [[todo: Benj has to check]] Smaller rules technology companies: (there's probably more that could list) Haley -- Benj Blaze -- Said XSB Inc. -- Benj Ontoprise -- Benj Research institutions: We could make a pretty long list! There are several dozen, e.g.: - participants in RuleML - participants in DAML, Joint Committee, SWSI; e.g., CMU, SUNY Stonybrook, DERI, etc. - authors of papers/talks at the ISWC RuleML scientific workshops held in 2002, 2003 - participants in REWERSE, newly-forming EU network of excellence on rules - etc. List of Companies and Organizations Potentially Interested in a W3C Semantic Web Rules Standard by B. Grosof, MIT Sloan Sch. of Mgmt. 14 10 7 November 2003