Bernard Horan -- bio

All

Jim asked me to send the group a brief bio. Here goes...

My interest in the Semantic Web (SW) arises out of research I undertook
several years ago at the University of Manchester. The domain of the
project was medical informatics and its focus was the development of a
clinical information system for use in day-to-day patient management by
GPs (also known as 'family practitioners' elsewhere). The project
utilised a semantic network to represent _what_could_be_said_ (for use
by a UI generation mechanism) and capture _what_was_said_ by the user.
The semantics were described in a language called SMK, which was later
developed into GRAIL.

Following on from that project, I pursued a career in the finance
industry, focussing on application development using Smalltalk. My
obsession with Smalltalk only came to an end after I'd written a
textbook on it (now out of print :-( and joined Sun Microsystems Labs in
CA, USA. I returned to the UK a couple of years ago, and currently
report into SunLabs Europe, which is located in Grenoble.

On the whole, my career has focussed on the goal of providing useful and
usable information systems. I'm interested in how to apply SW
technologies (and ontologies, in particular) to that goal. I'm pleased
to see that the WebOnt requirements document manages to capture the
problem areas for which an ontology seems a suitable solution.

cheers

Bernard

=====================================================================
Bernard Horan
Sun Microsystems Ltd, M/S ECBG01
Sun House, 306 Cambridge Science Park
Milton Road, Cambridge, CB4 0WG, UK
bernard.horan@sun.com
+44 (0)1223 418925
+44 (0)1223 420058 fax

Received on Friday, 19 April 2002 11:10:06 UTC