Chris Welty - intro

Webont Folks,

I'm excited to be on board.  I recently came to IBM Research from academia 
(Vassar College), where it would not have been possible for me to be an 
(official) participant in this effort.

I've been involved in "Semantic Web" related research since about 1994, 
long before that is what it was called.  I was interested in treating the 
then rapidly emerging web as a vast library, and drawing upon the very 
long standing work in library science and the (comparatively) new work in 
AI, KR, and Description Logics, to help make *information more 
accessible*.  I have never stopped working on that problem.  I had some 
connection to the SGML community then, and was one of the first in that 
community to propose that a DTD did not provide enough "semantics" to 
achieve the goals that the digital library community expected, and that a 
KR formalism could help quite a bit.  I helped to define a more robust 
model for bibliographic data, including the notion that information can 
exist independent of the form, and I also spent some time working in the 
text encoding community (TEI), identifying ontological issues in indexing 
texts.

I have experience actually engineering "ontologies" for companies, having 
worked on contracts ranging from database integration to large scale 
knowledge engineering for document management to "model evaluation" (what 
we might call "ontology evaluation".)

More recently, probably more of you have heard of me through the formal 
ontology work I did with Nicola Guarino, having publishing quite a bit on 
that in the past two years, including a CACM article last month.   I've 
been involved with the IEEE SUO effort from the beginning, and have been 
participating in the group that has been trying to standardize a 
foundation for logical language based on KIF and CGs.

I have returned more directly to the problem I'm mainly interested: using 
KR&R to make information more accessible.  At IBM Research I am working 
with some NL and a few IR people to improve question answering (as in 
TREC).  I am interested in making KR work *with* these less precise 
methods, and in identifying sources of knowledge that can be mined.

I have scanned the past two months of email and read several of the 
relevant documents.  I will try my best to stay quiet for a little while 
until I feel like I'm comfortable with the topics, though I'm sure I'll 
start speaking too soon.  It looks like the area I'll be most interested 
in will be, from the descriptions, the guidelines.

I have an up to date web page at http://www.cs.vassar.edu/faculty/welty/ 
that lists some recent work and publications.  This page will stay active 
for the foreseeable future (I'm leaving Vassar on pretty good terms), but 
I will be moving it over to IBM eventually when I figure out how...

-Chris

Dr. Christopher A. Welty                                  Voice: +1 
914.784.7055
IBM Watson Research Center                                IBM T/L: 
863.7055
Hawthorne, NY                                                   Fax: +1 
914.784.6078
welty@us.ibm.com

Received on Monday, 15 April 2002 15:44:06 UTC