User:ElisaKendall

I'm CEO of Sandpiper Software, a small, California-based company focused on ontology-based software development. We currently provide a UML-based tool for ontology development and management, along with a library of ontologies that our customers use to jump-start their development process. Our R&D is currently focused on a next generation development environment to support ontology-based software engineering, and also on run-time applications that use a combination of reasoning capabilities to solve complex event processing problems. You can read more about us at http://www.sandsoft.com/.

My background includes over ten years in knowledge representation and reasoning research and development, with early work using KIF, working with the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory. Bob Engelmore was a founding board member of our company, and Deborah McGuinness is our chief scientist. My interest in KR&R goes back to the mid-1980's, when I completed a masters at Stanford in Situation Semantics under Stanley Peters, though.

From a standards perspective, I co-chair the Ontology PSIG at the Object Management Group with Evan Wallace, and am co-author of the Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM). I'm also actively involved in the W3C's Semantic Web Deployment WG, and participated in both the Semantic Web Best Practices and Rule Interchange Format Working Groups (until it clashed directly with SWD). I also work with the ANSI L8 Metadata working group (the US contributor to the ISO SC32 metadata community) and am very interested in bridging the three organizations to improve communications and effectiveness of the work that we are all engaged in.

My hope for the working group includes supporting some of the extensions proposed in the OWL 1.1 submission that are really sorely needed to support the software and information engineering we're involved in, primarily from a user perspective. I also represent a growing community of folks at OMG and elsewhere who are very excited about ontology-based software engineering and using ontologies as a basis for model-driven architecture, who need some of the new features described in the submission but also want to retain the relationship with RDF.

I am hoping to contribute to the development of a MOF metamodel for the revised OWL standard, as well as provide feedback via the metamodeling work to the core language developers. We did this very successfully for Common Logic, with an end result that both the metamodel and language benefited from the work in ways we could not have foreseen. I'm also interested as a tool developer, user, and ontologist, to facilitate usability of the resulting language.