Introduction

I am serving as the alternate participant for the University of
Maryland MIND Laboratory.  Here's my standard bio sketch:

  Dr. Timothy W.  Finin is a Professor in the Department of Computer
  Science and Electrical Engineering and director of the Institute for
  Global Electronic Commerce at the University of Maryland Baltimore
  County (UMBC). He has over 30 years of experience in the applications
  of AI to problems in information systems, intelligent interfaces and
  robotics and is currently working on the theory and applications of
  intelligent software agents.  He holds degrees from MIT and the
  University of Illinois.  Prior to joining the UMBC, he held positions
  at Unisys, the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT AI Laboratory.
  Finin is the author of over 140 refereed publications and has received
  research grants and contracts from a variety of sources.  He has been
  the past program chair or general chair of several major conferences,
  including the IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence for
  Applications, The ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge
  Management, and the ACM Autonomous Agents conference.  He is a former
  AAAI councilor and is currently AAAI's representative on the board of
  directors of the Computing Research Association.

I've been working in AI since 1971 and have moved through many areas:
computer vision, robotics, NLP, expert systems, knowledge
representation and reasoning and agents based systems.  If there has
been a common theme, it's been symbolic knowledge representation and
reasoning.

My basic information:

 <rdf:RDF xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/contact#"
     xmlns:org="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/roadmap/org#"
     xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
     <rdf:Description>
         <org:member rdf:parseType="Resource">
             <familyName>Finin</familyName>
             <givenName>Tim</givenName>
             <fullName>Tim Finin</fullName>
             <mailbox rdf:resource="mailto:finin@umbc.edu"/>
             <homePageAddress rdf:resource="http://umbc.edu/~finin/"/>
          </org:member>
   </rdf:Description>
 </rdf:RDF>

Here's my closest airport, but I'm not sure how to assert that Finin's
closest airport is this.  I guess we need to define a closestAirport
property whose domain is things and range is airports and put that
definition is some ontology.  Or maybe we need a closeTo property with
domain things and range places with locations (e.g. lat-long).  But
then of course the meaning of closeTo should depend on scale of the
things being related.  (Mercury may be close to the Sun, but my house
is *not* close to Ocean City MD.)

<apt:Airport rdf:about="http://www.megginson.com/exp/id/airports/KBWI">
    <apt:icao>KBWI</apt:icao>
    <apt:name>Baltimore, Baltimore-Washington International Airport, MD, United States</apt:na\
me>
    <apt:iata>BWI</apt:iata>
    <apt:latitude>39-10-00N</apt:latitude>
    <apt:longitude>076-1-00W</apt:longitude>
    <apt:elevation>59M</apt:elevation>
 </apt:Airport>

Received on Wednesday, 7 November 2001 22:50:46 UTC