Tom Gruber

Thomas Robert (Tom) Gruber (1959) is an American Computer scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur with a focus on systems for knowledge sharing and collective intelligence. He did foundational work in ontology engineering and is well-known for his definition of ontologies in the context of Artificial Intelligence. [http://iswc2006.semanticweb.org/program/keynote_gruber.php Tom Gruber Keynote] at ISWC2006. Retrieved 6 Oktober 2008.]

Biography

Tom Gruber studied Psychology and Computer Science at the Loyola University in New Orleans where he received a double major B.S. in 1981 and graduated summa cum laude. He had designed and implemented a computer-assisted instruction (CAI) system for programmed-curriculum courses. It was the first of its kind at the university, and is used routinely by the Psychology department for introductory courses. In 1984 he received a M.S. in Computer and Information Science at the University of Massachusetts. His Master's research had resulted in the design and implementation of an intelligent communication prosthesis assistant, a computer system which enables people with severe physical disabilities who cannot otherwise speak to communicate in natural language presented in displayed, written, or spoken form. For years later in 1988 at the University of Massachusetts he received there a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science with the dissertation "The Acquisition of Strategic Knowledge". His dissertation research had addressed a critical problem for Artificial Intelligence--knowledge acquisition--with a computer assistant that acquires strategic knowledge from experts. [http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/people/gruber/gruber-cv.html Thomas Robert Gruber] . Home page at Stanford. Last updated 1995. Retrieved 6 October 2008.]

From 1988 to 1994 Gruber has been a Research Associate at the Knowledge Systems Laboratory of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. He has been working on the How Things Work, SHADE, and Knowledge Sharing Technology projects. In 1994 he became Senior Project Leader, Enterprise Integration Technologies and proposed and designed several projects using the Internet to create shared, virtual environments for collaborative learning and work (for ARPA, NASA, NIST). Proposed a business plan for corporate training. In 1995 he founded and became Chief Technology Officer of Intraspect Software, an enterprise software company that pioneered the space of collaborative knowledge management. Intraspect applications help professional people collaborate in large distributed communities, continuously contributing to a collective body of knowledge.

He has been a member of journal editorial boards of the "Knowledge Acquisition", "IEEE Expert" and "Internation Journal of Human-Computer Studies".

Work

Grubers research interested in the 1990s were in the field of developing intelligent networked software to support human collaboration and learning. Areas of specialty include: knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, computer-supported collaborative work, computer-mediated communication for design, and knowledge sharing technology.

Web collaboration and knowledge sharing

At Stanford University in the early 1990's, Gruber was a pioneer in the use of the Web for collaboration and knowledge sharing. He invented HyperMail, a widely-used open source application that turns email conversations into collective memories, which chronicled many of the early discussions that helped define the Web. He built ontology-engineering tools and established the first web-based public exchange for ontologies, software, and knowledge bases.

Ontology

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) community has been researching the knowledge representation and retrieval problems for a long time. Their approach to define standard facilities to describe human knowledge at any granularity level and to obtain ability. The basis of the AI approach is ontologies, which means the consensus conceptualization of the real world. This is initially defined by Tom Gruber in 1993. Once the needed ontologies are established, people can index the unstructured knowledge of existing documents and convert them to formal represented knowledge. Then searchers can utilize some kind of intelligent agents to browse, modify and query the knowledge basis. Zhifeng Yang (2002). "Applying Information Retrieval Technology to Incremental Knowledge Management". In: "Engineering and Deployment of Cooperative Information Systems: First International Conference, EDCIS 2002, Beijing, China, September 17-20, 2002 : Proceedings". Yanbo Han (Red.) p.117-120]

Work in Artificial Intelligence has been exploring the use of formal ontologies as a way of specifying content-specific agreements for the sharing and reuse of knowledge among software entities. Gruber has taken an engineering perspective on the development of such ontologies. Formal ontologies are viewed as designed artifacts, formulated for specific purposes and evaluated against objective design criteria. We describe the role of ontologies in supporting knowledge sharing activities, and then present a set of criteria to guide the development of ontologies for these purposes. Gruber has shown how these criteria are applied in case studies from the design of ontologies for engineering mathematics and bibliographic data. Selected design decisions are discussed, and alternative representation choices and evaluated against the design criteria. [Thomas Gruber (1993). "Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing". In: "International Journal Human-Computer Studies" Vol. 43, Issues 5-6, Novemer 1995, p.907-928.]

The Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is an ecosystem of interaction among computer systems. The social web is an ecosystem of conversation among people. Both are enabled by conventions for layered services and data exchange. Both are driven by human-generated content and made scalable by machine-readable data. Yet there is a popular misconception that the two worlds are alternative, opposing ideologies about how the web ought to be. Folksonomy vs. ontology. Practical vs. formalistic. Humans vs. machines.

This is nonsense According to Gruber (2006), and it is time to embrace a unified view. He has come to the vision of the Semantic Web as a substrate for collective intelligence. The best shot we have of collective intelligence in our lifetimes is large, distributed human-computer systems. The best way to get there is to harness the "people power" of the Web with the techniques of the Semantic Web. In this presentation I will show several ways that this can be, and is, happening.

RealTravel

Grubers current project is RealTravel.com [ [http://tomgruber.org/technology/realtravel.htm ] , which aspires to be the best place on the web to share knowledge and experiences about travel. RealTravel provides an environment for a community of travel enthusiasts to create beautiful travel journals of their adventures, share them with friends and family, and learn from other like-minded travelers.

See also

* IDEF5
* Social Semantic Web
* Soft ontology

Publications

Gruber published several articles and some books [ [http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/g/Gruber:Thomas_R=.html DBLP: Thomas R. Gruber] .] . A selection:
* 1989. "The Acquisition of Strategic Knowledge". Dissertation University of Massachusetts. Academic Press.

Articles a selection:
* 1992. [http://tomgruber.org/writing/onto-design.pdf "Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing"] . In: "International Journal Human-Computer Studies". Vol 43, p.907-928.
* 1993. [http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/people/gruber/gruber-cv.html "A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications"] . In: "Knowledge Acquisition", 5(2):199-220, 1993
* 2008, [http://tomgruber.org/writing/ontology-in-encyclopedia.htm Ontology] . Entry in the Encyclopedia of Database Systems, Ling Liu and M. Tamer Özsu (Eds.), Springer-Verlag, to appear in 2008.

References

External links

* [http://tomgruber.org/ Tom Gruber] Recent homepage.
* [http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/people/gruber/ Tom Gruber] Homepage in 1994 at Stanford