Thinking Clearly .

I may regret this, but, after installing Akismet and watching it crush blog spam, I decided to turn off registration as a prerequisite to post comments here. At the very least, this may prove to be a good test for Akismet.

But the real reason is that I wanted to make it easier for our readers to comment on what we’re saying and doing.

So: cry havoc and let slip the dogs of spam, I suppose.

We’re starting to give more talks at more conferences since our SemWeb infrastructure framework—from OWL reasoners and ontology browsers, to RDF linked data browsers, to policy management apps— is really starting to round itself out. Upcoming talks include:

1. 28 April, Boston, BioIT World Conference’s “Harnessing the Semantic Web for Your Organization” workshop . Mike Smith is giving a talk with our NCI customers about how HCLS and other bio orgs can start to take advantage of semantic web stuff.
2. 19 to 21 May, San Jose, Semantic Technology Conference (Bad URL that will break for the 2009 conference; ironic, that!). Evren Sirin, Mike Smith, Pavel Klinov, and I will be giving three talks—Pellet, Pronto, and XACML-DL Policy Analysis. Actually, I’ll be there trying to act “managerial”; I leave the talk-giving to the smart guys.
3. 2 to 4 June, Palisades, NY, POLICY 2008. Markus Stocker and I will be giving a demo talk of XACML-DL, our XACML policy analysis tool.

Upcoming we’re targeting a conference about Ontologies and Model-Driven Architectures (MDA)— which is what OMG is doing now that CORBA is dead-dead-dead—that’s sometime in the fall in Toulouse, which is nice.

One of our new customers—who’s sponsoring a pending Pellet maintenance release, version 1.5.2, that should be out ver soon—is using Pellet to drive a pretty complex code-generation process, and that’s an area where we think Pellet has a huge upside. And we’ve found giving talks and papers with customers as partners is a good pattern.

If you’re planning on attending any of these conferences, shoot me an email as we’d love to chat with users, friends, fans, and interested bystanders.

Following Monday’s announcement of the release of OwlSight .50, we’re pleased to announce another update to OwlSight, version .51. This is a minor bug fix release and no new functionality was added. Thanks to those users who took the time to report issues:

• URL escaping of parameters passed into OwlSight
• Rendering of datatype values for Individuals has been fixed
• If an error occurs while generating an explanation, control is properly returned to the main application window.

If you are interested in learning more about OwlSight, please head over to the OwlSight page on owldl.com.

As Kendall suggested in a previous blog, I was doing some hacking on OwlSight last week, and well, for the last several weeks really. I’ve had some free time on my hands ever since we released POPS and I’ve been spending it with my new baby, and everyone’s favorite in-browser ontology viewer, OwlSight. About three weeks ago, we released a major update; the big news was that we now supported the newly released Pronto and I had recoded pretty much the entire interface using Gwt-Ext.

In the weeks since that announcement, I’ve gone on to further extend the functionality of OwlSight. The main items of interest are:

• Support for viewing annotations
• Support for Individuals
• GRDDL based ontology repository support
• Enhanced the Property view, adding domains, ranges and inverse property information
• Storage of your ontology repository in a browser cookie so its loaded each time you run OwlSight
• Improved explanation rendering
• OwlSight handles URL parameters; links to ontologies or repositories can be passed in and loaded on startup.

You can find some more details information about our ontology repository work here and there is now a very simple, and probably incomplete, OwlSight readme.

Make your own ontology repository. Link to OwlSight from your web pages, and use it to show off your favorite ontologies. Until next time, stay classy Cyberspace.

We’re looking for an experienced Java programmer to join us to work on R&D projects and production systems in reasoning, planning, description logics, semantic web services, logistics, etc.

The successful applicant will be smart and have a demonstrable record of getting things done.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in CS or similar field
• Minimum 5 years of serious programming experience
• Experience with AI, KR, logic programming a definite plus
• Enthusiasm for solving difficult, algorithmically novel problems required
• Familiarity with database theory valuable
• Familiarity with systems or operations research also valuable
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

We offer the following compensations:

• Competitive salary and good benefits
• Intellectually stimulating work that matters
• regular office sports outings, Wii tournaments, sundry other diversions
• great espresso & coffee & a well-stocked ‘fridge
• Beer Fridays
• great location, and a bad MOFO office, in downtown DC

To apply, email me—Kendall Clark—a resume and cover letter. We are an equal opportunity employer and encourage all qualified candidates to apply.