Chris Welty
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
computer scientist
Computer scientist
A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....
, is a Research Scientist at IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Thomas J. Watson Research Center
The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for the IBM Research Division.The center is on three sites, with the main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, 38 miles north of New York City, a building in Hawthorne, New York, and offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.- Overview :The...
in Hawthorne, NY, and formerly a professor in the Computer Science Department of Vassar College
Vassar College
Vassar College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, in the United States. The Vassar campus comprises over and more than 100 buildings, including four National Historic Landmarks, ranging in style from Collegiate Gothic to International,...
and a distinguished lecturer of the Association for Computing Machinery
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
. He is best known for his work on ontologies, in the Semantic Web
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
, and on IBM's Watson. While on sabbatical from Vassar in 1999-2000, he collaborated with Nicola Guarino
Nicola Guarino
Nicola Guarino is a researcher in the area of Formal Ontology for Information Systems, and the head of the Laboratory for Applied Ontology , part of the Italian National Research Council in Trento.- History :...
on OntoClean
OntoClean
OntoClean is a methodology for analyzing ontologies based on formal, domain-independent properties of classes due to Nicola Guarino and Chris Welty.-Overview and History:...
; he was co-chair of the W3C Rule Interchange Format
Rule Interchange Format
The Rule Interchange Format is a W3C Recommendation. RIF is part of the infrastructure for the semantic web, along with SPARQL, RDF and OWL...
working group from 2005-2009.
Background and education
Dr. Welty is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteRensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Stephen Van Rensselaer established the Rensselaer School on November 5, 1824 with a letter to the Rev. Dr. Samuel Blatchford, in which van Rensselaer asked Blatchford to serve as the first president. Within the letter he set down several orders of business. He appointed Amos Eaton as the school's...
, (RPI) where he worked for the Free Software Foundation
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...
on version 16-18 of GNU Emacs as well as the formation of NYSERNet
NYSERNet
NYSERNet is an non-profit internet service provider in New York State. It mainly provides internet access to universities, colleges, museums, healthcare facilities, primary and secondary schools, and research institutions.NYSERNet's network reaches from Buffalo to New York City...
during the emergence of the InterNet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
. 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. This magazine
was published in place of the SIGART Bulletin from 1999-2001.
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 (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.
His PhD work focused on extending the work of Prem Devanbu at AT&T on Lassie with a better developed ontology. After his PhD, he moved to Vassar College
Vassar College
Vassar College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, in the United States. The Vassar campus comprises over and more than 100 buildings, including four National Historic Landmarks, ranging in style from Collegiate Gothic to International,...
, where his work shifted away from Software Engineering and towards ontology. In 1998, he published 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.
OntoClean
During 1999-2000, while on sabbatical from Vassar College in Padova, Italy, he formed a productive collaboration with Nicola GuarinoNicola Guarino
Nicola Guarino is a researcher in the area of Formal Ontology for Information Systems, and the head of the Laboratory for Applied Ontology , part of the Italian National Research Council in Trento.- History :...
to develop OntoClean
OntoClean
OntoClean is a methodology for analyzing ontologies based on formal, domain-independent properties of classes due to Nicola Guarino and Chris Welty.-Overview and History:...
, a notable and widely recognized contribution in Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
, specifically Ontologies. According to Thompson-ISI, work on OntoClean was the most cited of academic papers on Ontology. OntoClean was important as it was the first formal methodology for ontology engineering
Ontology engineering
Ontology engineering in computer science and information science is a new field, which studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies: formal representations of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts....
, applying scientific principles to a field whose practice was mostly art.
Semantic Web
Although an active participant in the Semantic WebSemantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
movement from the start, it was only after he moved to IBM Research
IBM Research
IBM Research, a division of IBM, is a research and advanced development organization and currently consists of eight locations throughout the world and hundreds of projects....
, that he formally joined the W3C Web Ontology Language
Web Ontology Language
The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web...
working group, as a co-editor of the OWL Guide.
From 2004-2005, at the end of the OWL WG, Welty led the Ontology Engineering and Patterns efforts in the Semantic Web Best Practices WG, helping to edit several important notes on using OWL, as well as the first W3C ontology for part-whole relations and time.
From 2005-2009, he was co-chair of the Rule Interchange Format
Rule Interchange Format
The Rule Interchange Format is a W3C Recommendation. RIF is part of the infrastructure for the semantic web, along with SPARQL, RDF and OWL...
(RIF) working group.
In 2007, he gave a keynote talk at the 6th International Semantic Web Conference in Busan, Korea.
Watson
Welty was one of the developers of Watson, the IBMIBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
computer that defeated
the best players on the American game show Jeopardy!
Jeopardy!
Griffin's first conception of the game used a board comprising ten categories with ten clues each, but after finding that this board could not be shown on camera easily, he reduced it to two rounds of thirty clues each, with five clues in each of six categories...
. He is identified as a member of the "Core Algorithms Team" and has said he is one of the 12 original members of the Watson team
. He appeared on the televised broadcasts of the show several times, commenting on the scientific aspects of the challenge and accomplishment, and was interviewed in numerous news broadcasts and publications.
He hosted the "viewing party" at RPI
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Stephen Van Rensselaer established the Rensselaer School on November 5, 1824 with a letter to the Rev. Dr. Samuel Blatchford, in which van Rensselaer asked Blatchford to serve as the first president. Within the letter he set down several orders of business. He appointed Amos Eaton as the school's...
's EMPAC on all three nights the show was aired (Feb 14-16). He gave the keynote talk on Watson at the Trentino region launching of the Semantic Valley initiative.