Lockheed Martin Fellow (ret.)
Greater Washington DC Area
USA
email: polzerh [at] alum.mit.edu {nid 3ALM}
My background is as a software developer, system/chief engineer, and project/program manager, with a variety of assignments on small and large information-intensive system development efforts. Although my career was primarily in the defense domain, I did have some assignments with commercial customers and with civil government customers. I also managed several Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD) projects with DARPA and also served as program manager on the DARPA STARS Program in the 1989-1993 timeframe. STARS was focused on software technology for adaptable, reusable systems, with three focus areas: domain-specific software reuse design and reuse libraries, software process and process enactment, and software development tool integration and interoperability. I also was the PM for the Lockheed Martin Rainbow Interoperability Initiative, a corporate-wide effort to increase interoperability across the portfolio of Lockheed Martin programs. As a Lockheed Martin Fellow I applied the lessons learned from my experiences on real-world systems to conduct interoperability workshops and program reviews, using the SCOPE model as the structured framework for exploring scope and interoperability assumptions that programs have made. The SCOPE model was later donated to NCOIC (www.ncoic.org) and improved/expanded to serve as a more general assessment/exploration framework to assist organizational stakeholders in understanding the implications of a network connected world on their systems and how they interact with others.
The SCOPE model includes a significant set of semantic interoperability dimensions and sub-dimensions, hence my interest in the Ontolog Forum. I also have a long standing interest in semantics and ontologies, going back to an automated full-text message analysis and indexing/dissemination system I was involved with implementing back in 1975. The DARPA STARS program also emphasized domain-specific semantics as part of designing for software reuse, and we built a software reuse library using semantic net technology. Some of the other systems I worked on involved integration of multiple diverse sources of information from different domains, each having different implicit ontologies and scope boundaries. Some of these systems involved interoperability across systems from multiple nations.
On a more personal note, I am retired from Lockheed Martin and enjoy vegetable gardening and home remodeling. I am not a native English speaker, learning English by immersion at the age of 6. I continued to study my native German after coming to the US, but also learned some Russian and Latin in High School. I actually worked for a German scientific instrument company as a German to English translator during my college years for spending money.
My main focus in participating in the Ontolog Forum is to make people more aware of the role that human institutions/domains play in giving meaning to words and "data". The NCOIC SCOPE model includes a number of dimensions and subdimensions that characterize the nature and scope of human institutions that sponsor the development of systems interacting with each other over a network connection, most notably, the Internet. I'd like to see more explicit recognition of the institutional scope of applicability of ontologies. And I'd also like to see the semantic interoperability dimensions of the SCOPE model improved through interaction with, and lessons learned from, the Ontolog Forum. (3WGU)
