Professor R. G. Goebel CEO, iCORE and Professor of Computing Science University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada
What is the role of the semantic layer cake for guiding the use of knowledge representation and machine learning in the development of the semantic web?
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been the consolidator for many ideas regarding the evolution of the World Wide Web (WWW), including the promotion of the so-called “Semantic Layer Cake” model for the development of the semantic web. The semantic layer cake provides a framework to discuss a variety of approaches to an integrated view of the meta-data that will support a broad range of machine and human manipulation of digital information.
Our goal is to develop a deeper understanding of the potential role of the semantic layer cake, by investigating some of the detailed relationships between the components. We also attempt to articulate some of the issues regarding the development of the semantic layer cake for real application. The path to this goal covers many fundamental issues underlying all of knowledge representation research. Paramount in this discussion is the goal of identifying the potential role of machine learning within the semantic layer cake, and finding the tradeoffs between the extremes of a completely automated construction of the semantic web via machine learning, versus one that is completely hand-engineered using the tools emerging from each layer of the semantic layer cake.
R.G. (Randy) Goebel is professor and chair in the Department of
Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He received his BSc
(Computer Science) from the University of Regina, his MSc
(Computing Science) from the University of Alberta, and PhD (Computer
Science) from the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Goebel's research is focused on the theory and application of
intelligent systems. His theoretical work on abduction, hypothetical
reasoning and belief revision is well known, and his recent application
of practical belief revision and constraint programming to scheduling,
layout, and web mining is now having industrial impact. His most recent
research interests are in web mining, machine learning and
visualization. He is a researcher in the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for
Machine Learning, located at the University of Alberta, and co-author
with David Poole and Alan Mackworth of a widely used textbook,
Computational Intelligence: A Logical Approach, published by Oxford
University Press.
He has previously held faculty appointments at the University of
Waterloo and the University of Tokyo,
and visiting research appointments with the Deutsche Forschungszentrum
für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI) Germany, National ICT Institute
Australia (NICTA), Real World Computing project (RWC),
Institute for New Generation Computing (ICOT), Fujitsu Laboratories,
Japan, and Multi-Media University (MMU), Malaysia. He is currently
actively involved in academic and industrial
collaborative research projects in Canada, Australia, Japan, Germany and
Malaysia. He is the editor of Computational Intelligence, an
international journal published by Blackwell, and past
member of the editorial board of AI Communications, the European journal
on artificial intelligence. He has been a program committee member and
chair of numerous international workshops and conferences
in AI-related areas and past chair of the steering committee for Pacific
Rim International Conferences on AI.
In his work with industry, he has participated as the research advisor
on several industrial projects involving crew scheduling, manufacturing
scheduling, transportation logistics, steel mill operation, and
pipeline scheduling with companies like CN (Canadian National railways),
Syncrude, and Hatch. He is on the board of directors of net-linx
(www.net-linx.com), an international publishing software company,
and on the board of PRECARN Associates (www.precarn.ca), a national,
member-owned industrial consortium supporting the development of
intelligent systems technologies.
He has been seconded from the University of Alberta to the position of
president and CEO of iCORE (Alberta Informatics Circle of Research Excellence),
starting January 1, 2005.