a few more use cases for completeness

Sorry for the late contribution – I was offline when this was officially
due.

These are a few use case interests from my research interests and also
from consulting.  References point to some examples of work I or
colleagues have done in these areas.
The last point is work led by McIlraith in our group at Stanford.

- search – from simple things like structured search like retrieving
tech reports, calendar entries[0], etc.  The search should include both
free text search and utilizing markup information and ontology
definitions.  This moves into conceptual search.  An early example of
simple and more complicated conceptual search using ontologies, markup,
and free text search is FindUR [1-3]
- intelligent interoperable e-commerce.  Use ontologies for all levels
of support including simple things like integrity checks, more
complicated support such as ontology merging and mapping to “standard”
upper level ontologies such as UNSPSC, etc.   Simple early versions of
this include electronic yellow pages such as Directory Westfield.  More
complicated versions of this include real configuration and solutions
across complicated domains.  Early examples of ontology-enhanced
configuration includes work on PROSE/QUESTAR [5].
- Explainable query answering systems using background ontologies and
markup to both answer queries as well as to provide followup questions.
One way of visualizing this might be “ask jeeves done with knowledge
representation” (instead of through a lot of hard coding).
- Personalized assistant.  One example I like is an assistant supporting
the logistics of travel – both making travel reservations and also
integrating that into appropriate systems like my palm pilot, expense
forms, etc.  I have a bit of this in a presentation for ICC2001 (but
Mike Dean’s detailed example is another excellent example of this
issue).
- Web services.  One of the focuses of KSL, Stanford's research over the
last 1.5 years has been the confluence of the Semantic Web and Web
Services -- self-contained Web-accessible programs, and devices,
together with distributed computing architectures.  As with DAML+OIL
(in the guise of DAML-S), we would like to use WOL to create ontologies
of Web Service properties and capabilities.  Such annotations would be
used to automate Web service discovery, Web service invocation and Web
service composition and interoperation. [6]

[0] http://www.quintillion.com/summit/calendar/
[1]  http://www.research.att.com/~dlm/findur/
[2] http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/iccs00-abstract.html
[3] http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/imia99-abstract.html
[4] http://www.ataclick.com/westfield/
[5] http://www.research.att.com/~dlm/papers/ieee-expert.html
[6] http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/sam/ieee01.pdf



--
 Deborah L. McGuinness
 Knowledge Systems Laboratory
 Gates Computer Science Building, 2A Room 241
 Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-9020
 email: dlm@ksl.stanford.edu
 URL: http://ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm
 (voice) 650 723 9770    (stanford fax) 650 725 5850   (computer fax)
801 705 0941

Received on Thursday, 6 December 2001 16:27:09 UTC