Where are the Semantics in the Semantic Web?

Michael Uschold, The Boeing Company

AI Center colloquium
April 2, 9:30-10:15am,101Hardman Hall

co-organized by

Organizer: Amit Sheth

 The most widely accepted defining feature of the Semantic Web is machine-usable content.  By this definition, the Semantic Web is already manifest in shopping agents that automatically access and use Web content to find the lowest air fares, or book prices. But where are the semantics? Most people regard the Semantic Web as a vision, not a reality—so shopping agents should not “count”. To use Web content, machines need to know what to do when they encounter it. This in turn, requires the machine to “know” what the content means (i.e. its semantics). The challenge of developing the Semantic Web is how to put this knowledge into the machine. The manner in which this is done is at the heart of the confusion about the Semantic Web.  The goal of this talk is to clear up some of this confusion.

The talk is based on an a paper that will appear in the AI Magazine sometime this year.

Biographical Sketch
Dr. Mike Uschold is a research scientist at Engineering and Information Technology, The Boeing Company. His interests center around the emerging field concerned with the development and application of ontologies. In the past decade he has been involved in a wide range of activities in this area, including research, applications and teaching. Dr. Uschold is on the industrial advisory board of a $10M five year UK research consortium on Advanced Knowledge Technologies (www.aktors.org). He also serves on the steering commitee of Ontology.Org, (www.ontology.org), a recently created organization whose mission includes facilitating the uptake of ontology technology for electronic commerce. He has been very active in organizing an participating in workshops and conferences on Ontologies,the Semantic Web, and Knowledge Management.

 He received his B.S. in mathematics and physics at Canisis College in Buffalo, N.Y in 1977, a Masters in computer science from Rutgers University in 1982, and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from The University of Edinburgh in 1991.  Before arriving at the Boeing Company in 1997, Dr. Uschold was a senior member of technical staff in the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) at the University of Edinburgh. He has also been a lecturer and a research associate at the Department of AI at the University of Edinburgh.