KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Ontology Based Architecture

Dr. Robert Balzer
Teknowledge Corporation, USA

Abstract

Ontology Based Architecture (OBA) is an open architecture that components can simply plug into and use to exchange ontologically defined objects with one another through a publish/subscribe interface. Components can also obtain objects via a query interface from an object repository maintained by the architecture of the current state of each published object.
OBA allows components to be dynamically attached, detached, and reattached, and to be distributed across networked computers, co-located in separate processes on a computer, and/or co-located within a single process.
OBA automatically enforces the ontology as a standard – only the objects defined by that ontology can be exchanged through the architecture – and compiles that ontology into the object-oriented languages in which its components are written.

Biography of the Keynote Speaker

Dr. Robert Balzer received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1964, 1965, and 1966, respectively. After several years at the Rand Corporation, he left to help form the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI) and serve as Professor of Computer Science at USC and Director of ISI's Software Sciences Division.
In 2000, after 28 years at ISI, he left to become the Chief Technical Officer at Teknowledge Corporation and to open the new headquarters for Teknowledge's Distributed Systems Group in Marina Del Rey. This group combines Artificial Intelligence, Database, and Software Engineering techniques to automate the software development process and support distributed systems. Current research includes wrapping COTS products to provide safe and secure execution environments, extend their functionality, and integrate them together; instrumenting software architectures; and generating systems from domain-specific specifications.
He has served as chairman of SIGART (The ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence); as program chairman for the First National Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence; chairman of the Los Angeles Organizing Committee for the 1985 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI); program co-chair for the 9th International Conference on Software Engineering, held in the Spring of 1987 in Monterey, California, and whose theme was ``Formalizing and Automating the Software Process'', co-chair for the 1st Intelligent Information Systems Workshop, held at Niagra-on-the-lake, Ontario, Canada, April, 1991, and co-chair of the 4th International Software Architecture Workshop in 2000. Elected AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) Fellow, 1993. Received most influential paper award at International Conference on Software Engineering 2001 (for paper on "Tolerating Inconsistency" published in 1991). Keynote speaker at International Conference on Software Process 1996, Automated Software Engineering Conference in 2001, International Conference on Software Engineering 2002, and International Conference on COTS-Based Software Systems 2003.
Dr. Balzer has been the Principle Investigator on over 30 DARPA and NSF programs in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Software Architectures, Program Generation, Domain Specific Languages, COTS Extensions, Ontology Driven Systems, and Cyber Defense. He has authored over 50 refereed Journal and Conference Proceeding articles.