Chris Welty
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Chris Welty, an American computer scientist, is a Research Scientist at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY, and formerly a professor in the Computer Science Department of Vassar College and a distinguished lecturer of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is best known for his work on ontologies. While on sabbatical from Vassar in 1999-2000, he collaborated with Nicola Guarino on OntoClean.
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[edit] Background and Education
Dr. Welty is a graduate of RPI, where he worked for the Free Software Foundation on version 16-18 of GNU Emacs as well as the formation of NYSERNet during the emergence of the InterNet. This synergy of interests made him an early public figure in AI, as he moderated the "NL-KR Digest" and the corresponding comp.ai.nlang-know-rep newsgroup (now defunct), which was at the time the widest vehicle for dissemination of announcements and moderated discussion in the natural language and knowledge representation communities. He later became the editor in chief of intelligence Magazine (sic), published by ACM[1]. This magazine is published in place of the SIGART Bulletin from 1999-2001.
According the Mathematics Genealogy Project, through his advisor Prof. Edwin Rogers, he is one of the over 10,000 academic descendents of the mathematician E.H. Moore.
Welty began to make his first scientific contributions in the early 1990s, when he emerged as a leading figure in the Automated Software Engineering community, whose on-line bibliography lists his 1995 paper as one of the best papers that year [2] (this would be the year he finished his PhD), becoming in each successive year the program chair, general chair, and steering committee chair of that conference: an unusual feat for a recent PhD graduate.
His PhD work[3] focused on extending the work of Prem Devanbu at AT&T on Lassie[4] with a better developed ontology. After his PhD, he moves to Vassar College, where his work seems to shift away from Software Engineering and towards ontology. In 1998, he publishes seminal work on the analysis of subjects in library information systems, dispelling the widely held myth at the time (which is now resurfacing) that subject taxonomies are ontologies[5].
[edit] OntoClean
During 1999-2000, while on sabbatical from Vassar College, he forms his now famous collaboration with Nicola Guarino to develop OntoClean, a notable and widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in Artificial Intelligence, specifically Ontologies. According to Thompson-ISI, work on OntoClean was the most cited of academic papers on Ontology[6]. OntoClean was important as it was the first formal methodology for ontology engineering, applying scientific principles to a field whose practice was mostly art.
[edit] Semantic Web
Although an active participant in the Semantic Web movement from the start, it is only after he moves to IBM Research, that he formally joins the W3C Web Ontology Language working group, as a co-editor of the OWL Guide[7]. He is later named co-chair of the Rule Interchange Format working group. In 2007, he gave a keynote talk at the 6th International Semantic Web Conference in Busan, Korea (see below).
[edit] Interesting
According to Dr. Welty, he is a distant relative of Eudora Welty, though they have never met.
[edit] References
- ^ Anne P. Wilson. ACM Announces intelligence Magazine.
- ^ ASE Conferences Best Papers.
- ^ Chris Welty. An Integrated Representation for Software Development and Discovery.
- ^ Prem Devanbu, Ron Brachman, and Peter Selfridge. LaSSIE: a knowledge-based software information system.
- ^ Chris Welty and Jessica Jenkins. An ontology for Subject.
- ^ Thompson. Emerging Research Fronts:Ontologies.
- ^ Michael K. Smith, Chris Welty, and Deborah McGuinness. OWL Web Ontology Language Guide.
[edit] External links
Dr. Welty's homepage can be found at http://www.research.ibm.com/people/w/welty/ A video of his ISWC-2007 keynote can be found at http://videolectures.net/iswc07_welty_hiwr/
