Re: New WG member - introduction

Bernard-
  welcome - as you have said, we are now moving towards implementation 
and declaring design done (probably on Thursday) - your help in 
helping us to find people doing implementations using OWL, to be 
involved in any press about OWL (i.e. that it is compatible w/TMs 
would be a nice thing to see), and to help us in promoting the use of 
OWL during the CR period will be very much appreciated.
  -Jim H.



At 10:57 PM +0200 7/18/03, Bernard Vatant wrote:
>Hello all
>
>Jim sent me today the notification of my acceptation as a member of this
>WG. I know, this is *very very* late, and the celebration is almost over,
>but honest, although I've been following closely the development of OWL
>since the very beginning, I could not ask for formal participation to the
>WG before, due first to delays in Mondeca's decision to become a W3C
>member, and then waiting for the official extension of SW Activity period.
>So, in fact, I feel this introduction as long overdue.
>
>Quick background: I'm 50, graduated in Maths from ENSET (France) back in
>'75. Have taught Maths, and a bit of Astronomy popularization, until the
>mid '90s. Shifted then to (what I did not know yet to be) Knowledge
>Engineering. That's what is on my visit card today, anyway, even if I'm not
>completely sure of what it means.
>
>I've been working as Senior Consultant for Mondeca since the end of Y2K,
>and started participating in the Topic Maps XTM Authoring Group by the same
>date. Since 2001, I've been chairing the OASIS Technical Committee on
>Published Subjects.
>See http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/tm-pubsubj
>
>My interest in WebOnt participation came through my involvment in Topic
>Maps, and the issues of their semantic foundation and interoperability with
>other semantic standards. Along with teams in graph theory (EHESS and
>LABRI), I've conducted research towards a mathematical model for TM, based
>on hypergraph structure.
>See http://www.mondeca.com/english/publications_-_doc.htm
>
>Moreover, current R&D in my company is aimed at integration of ontologies
>in its software, to constrain and control TM Knowlegde Bases, and of course
>OWL is on everyday's menu one way or another. I'm then focused as well on
>implementation, deployment and integration, interoperability issues as on
>language design itself - being well aware that this aspect is almost over
>anyway.
>
>Two particular points I would be interested to work about:
>
>- Interoperability of OWL identifiers with other ways of identification of
>"subjects" (including Published Subjects), across languages, systems,
>applications. Finding ways to make sure that all actors in a system
>"conversation" have the same notion of "what the subject is" seems to me
>THE central issue. As a matter of fact, I felt it as a major issue already
>when I was teaching maths, and well, this is maybe my "idée fixe".
>
>- Interoperability of OWL with Topic Maps. My current line of thought being
>that TM model should be expressed as an explicit kind of ontology, set on
>some clean and exchangeable semantics, and stop pretend being an "ontology
>agnostic" specification. I've made some proposals in that direction,
>without much feedback so far - this viewpoint has not been very popular in
>TM community.
>
>Well, I guess that's all for today. I'm sure to learn many things here, and
>I hope to bring about a few.
>
>Bernard
>
>Bernard Vatant
>Senior Consultant
>Knowledge Engineering
>Mondeca - www.mondeca.com
>bernard.vatant@mondeca.com

-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  *** 240-277-3388 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler      *** NOTE CHANGED CELL NUMBER ***

Received on Friday, 18 July 2003 17:20:14 UTC