[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
Wednesday, January 8, 2003
206 Egan  Hall, Northeastern University
    (building 60 on http://www.campusmap.neu.edu/)  
1030-1230

Kenneth Baclawski
College of Computer and Information Science


An ontology is a theory about what entities can exist and how entities
can be related with each other in a domain.  Ontologies are emerging
as the most effective means for enabling flexible communication
between autonomous computer systems.  The notion of ontology is at the
center of the "Semantic Web", proposed by Tim Berners-Lee and featured
in a recent article in Scientific American.  This talk will give some
motivation for ontology-based computing and will discuss some of the
research and development efforts that are attempting to make
ontology-based computing a reality:

-- The Web Ontology Language (OWL), a standard language for expressing
   ontologies and knowledge representations.

-- Inference and consistency checking.

-- Performance and scalability problems.

-- Integration with other computer-based technologies, such as
   programming languages, databases, Web servers, etc.

-- Applications of ontology-based computing in such diverse areas as
   biomedical research, wireless communication and situation awareness.

Upcoming presentations:

1/22/03 Jonathan Bachrach, MIT, "Macros for Java"

--Mitch