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 30 years in computational linguistics, knowledge representation, and in the past 18 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 Council of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA, http://www.iaoa.org/), and was a candidate for President in 2013. He was on the original 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 Peter Yim and Kurt Conrad, 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 Peter Yim and Mike Dean (http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OpenOntologyRepository).    (3XSN)

Leo is on the editorial board of the journal of Applied Ontology (http://www.applied-ontology.org/). 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; co-editor (with Terry Janssen and Werner Ceusters) of the book "Ontologies and Semantic Technologies for Intelligence," IOS Press, August, 2010; and has published many book chapters, conference and workshop papers (over 60 refereed papers) and many reviews. He has organized or been a program committee member on more than 70 conferences/workshops, including Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), Ontologies for the Intelligence Community (OIC), the Association for the Advanced of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC). Along with Steve Ray and Peter Yim, Leo has founded and convened the Ontology Summit conference series, which NIST, Ontolog, and other co-organizers have organized on an annual basis since 2006. Along with Mike Dean (BBN), Leo was the local organizer for the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2009, October 25-29, 2009, Chantilly, VA. He was the general co-chair (with Nicola Guarino) for Ontology Summit 2012: Ontologies for Big Systems: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2012_Symposium, and a track co-chair for Ontology Summit 2013: Ontology Evaluation across the Ontology Lifecycle: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2013.    (3XSG)

He has 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)

Some recent or forthcoming publications:    (IR7)

See also:    (IR3)