- From: Christopher Welty <welty@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 15:43:12 -0400
- To: www-webont-wg@w3.org
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