Leo Obrst    (IR1)

Dr. Leo Obrst is a principal artificial intelligence scientist in the Information Discovery and Understanding department at MITRE’s (www.mitre.org) Command and Control Center, where he created and led, but now advises the Information Semantics Group (semantics, ontological engineering, knowledge representation and management), and has been involved in projects on Semantic Web rule/ontology interaction, context-based semantic interoperability, ontology-based knowledge management, conceptual search and information retrieval, metadata and taxonomy/thesaurus construction for community knowledge sharing, intelligent agent technology, semantic support for natural language processing, and ontology-based modeling of complex decision-making. He is also currently involved in many US federal government efforts to establish Communities of Interest (COI) vocabularies and ontoloiges for information sharing, including the development of universal and common models which span those COIs.    (14OC)

In 1999-2001, he was director of ontological engineering at VerticalNet.com, a department he formed to create ontologies in the product and service space to support Business-to-Business e-commerce. Leo's PhD is in theoretical linguistics with a concentration in formal semantics from the University of Texas-Austin. He has worked over 25 years in computational linguistics, knowledge representation, and in the past 15 years in ontological engineering and more recently in Semantic Web technologies. Leo has also been employed by Boeing, Software Development Group (a partner), Intelligent Business Systems, the Microelectronics Computer Corporation (MCC), Texas Instruments, SoftCraft, and Ohio Edison.    (14OD)

Leo is a member of the Executive Committee of the National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR, http://ncor.us/), and the chair of the NCOR Technical Committee. He was a member of the W3C Web Ontology Working Group (http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/) that developed the Web Ontology Language OWL, 2002-2004. Along with PeterYim and KurtConrad, he co-founded the Ontolog Forum (http://ontolog.cim3.net) in 2002, an open community of practice which focuses on the promotion of ontological engineering and semantic technologies, and is also one of the co-champions of the Open Ontology Repository effort, with PeterYim and MikeDean (http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OpenOntologyRepository). He is a member of AAAI, LSA, and ACM. His research interests include semantic interoperability/integration, automated reasoning, formalization of context for ontology mapping and merging, and formal upper ontologies, Semantic Web rules, hybrid logic, answer set programming, and the application of formal ontology and formal semantics to ontological engineering. Leo is on the editorial board of the journal of Applied Ontology (http://www.applied-ontology.org/). He has been dissertation advisor or committee member for five Ph.D students. He is co-author (with Mike Daconta and Kevin Smith) of the book The Semantic Web: The Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management. John Wiley, Inc., June, 2003, and has published many book chapters, conference and workshop papers (over 40 refereed papers) and many reviews. He has organized or been a program committee member on more than 40 conferences/workshops, including Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS) and Ontology for the Intelligence Community (OIC). Along with SteveRay and PeterYim, Leo has founded and convened the Ontology Summit conference series, which NIST, Ontolog, and other co-organizers have been putting together, on an annual basis since 2006. Along with MikeDean (BBN), Leo is the local organizer for the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2009, which will take place in the greater Washington, DC area.    (14OE)

I have many personal interests, including dogs (with a couple of cats and chickens thrown in) and writing poetry and fiction (though it's nearly entirely poetry these days). "De Colóres" was a selected finalist for the 1996 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, Nimrod International Journal.    (1WOV)

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Some recent or forthcoming publications:    (IR7)

See also:    (IR3)