We Won!
by Bijan Parsia
So, a ton of stuff happened over the last 7 or 8 days (OWLWG meeting, Product Modeling XG meeting, OWLED, ISWC, RDB2RDF XG meeting, New Ever Awesomer Pellet) and I hope to carve out some time to post about it all, but the latest big news is that the following paper:
Matthew Horridge, Bijan Parsia, and Uli Sattler: Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL
won the best (research) paper award! I can’t tell you what a pleasure this is on so many fronts. Matthew is just into the second year of his PhD with Uli and me and it’s amazing (but not unexpected) that he churned out this level of quality in his work. It’s very gratifying to have ISWC recognize this.
Also, I hope this changes perceptions amongst people (esp. people who review our papers) that explanation is a “finished” or trivial area. This is the second best paper award for an explanation paper (that I know of) in the past few years and it was extremely non-trivial. I, certainly, had been working on it since Aditya graduated (he had a first stab in his thesis). Other researchers had worked on it. This paper nails it and it took many months of work to get it. However, I’ve, over the years, gotten a surprising number of comments to the effect that explanation wasn’t interesting, or it was solved. In fact, when Matthew was considering starting a PhD on explanation, several people told him that they didn’t think there was enough to do on the topic for a PhD!
Take that!
Matthew did a brilliant job on all fronts: Theoretical, algorithm design, implementation, user interface design, and experimentation. We have some truly intriguing results. His talk was videoed and should show up on the web in due course.
Expect the groovy new explanation features to show up soon in Pellet. They’ll blow your mind.