Leo Obrst (7K)
Leo is a senior artificial intelligence scientist at the MITRE Center for Innovative Computing and Informatics in Northern Virginia (www.mitre.org) where he leads the Information Semantics team (semantics, ontological engineering, knowledge representation), and has been involved in projects on context-based semantic interoperability, ontology-based knowledge management, conceptual information retrieval, metadata and thesaurus construction for community knowledge sharing, intelligent agent technology, and ontology-based modeling of complex decision-making. He’s the former 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 20 years in computational linguistics, knowledge representation, and in the past eight years in ontological engineering. He is co-author (with Mike Daconta and Kevin Smith) of the recent book The Semantic Web: The Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management. John Wiley, Inc., June, 2003. Leo is a member of the W3C Web Ontology Working Group (http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/), developing the Web Ontology Language OWL, and the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology working group, in which he is currently the assistant technical editor for one proposed standard upper ontology candidate, the Information Flow Framework (http://suo.ieee.org/). He also participates in the OntoWeb network, the Semantic Web Services Initiative's Industrial Partners forum (http://www.swsi.org/), and the [ontolog-forum] (http://ontolog.cim3.net/), which focuses on ontologies and business. He is a member of AAAI, ACL, LSA, and ACM. (7L)