Peter F. Patel-Schneider

I am a Member of Technical Staff in the Network Data and Services Research Deparment of the Convergence, Software, and Computer Science Laboratory at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. In 1996 and 1997 I was a Member of Technical Staff and a Technology Associate in AT&T Labs - Research. From 1988 to 1996 I was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Labs.

Research

I have a number of environmental allergies. My most severe allergy, however, is my allergy to hype. The severity of this allergy has dimished somewhat over the last few years due to continual exposure to the allergen. As well, I perform certain satirical activities which serve to diminish the effects of hype on me.

Description Logics

My research interests center around description logics. I'm currently interested in using description logics for interactively gathering information from a user and using description logics in database integration. In general, I am interested in making description logics useful in applications, as well as the theory of description logics.

I spend much of my time determining what is easy, what is hard, and what is impossible in my parts of knowledge representation and reasoning. I then quickly handle the easy, try hard to make the hard less hard, and spend considerable time evading the impossible. The divisions between easy, hard, and impossible are difficult to determine, and this is made even harder because every new group that I interact with has to learn that some gs are just impossible even though they are very seductive at first glance.

Web Ontology Languages

Most recently my efforts in description logics have involved the creation of languages suitable for representing ontology information. I have been on the project advisory board of the DARPA DAML project. I have created and edited several portions of the DAML+OIL ontology language. I participated in the W3C Web Ontology Working Group, designing a web language for ontologies. I was the main editor for the semantic definition of OWL, OWL Web Ontology Language: Semantics and Abstract Syntax. (See below for several talks on OWL.) A good paper on the practical use of OWL is OWL Pizzas: Practical Experience of Teaching OWL-DL, even though it is a paper about teaching OWL-DL, not a paper meant to teach OWL-DL.

I participated in the design of an extension to OWL, called OWL 1.1. I have written drafts of an overview of OWL 1.1 and a syntax for OWL 1.1. OWL 1.1 was a member submission to W3C and is now the subject of the W3C OWL WG, of which I am a member.

I have implemented OWLP, an OWL species validator, using the Galax XQuery implementation. OWLP is written in OCAML. OWLP is available from the Bell Labs Software Distribution site under the Lucent public license.

I have written a paper, From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: The Making of a Web Ontology Language, with Ian Horrocks and Frank van Harmelen, on the development of OWL. Ian Horrocks and I have written a paper, Reducing OWL Entailment to Description Logic Satisfiability, on the relationship between entailment in OWL and satisfiability in Description Logics. Ian Horrocks and I have written a paper, Three Theses of Representation in the Semantic Web, on the foundations of the Semantic Web.

Jérôme Siméon and I have created a way to more-closely integrate XML and RDF. This work has resulted in two papers, The Yin/Yang Web: XML Syntax and RDF Semantics, which was one of four finalists for the best paper award at the Eleventh International World Wide Web Conference, and Building the Semantic Web on XML, which won the best paper award at the First International Semantic Web Conference. A combination of these papers, The Yin/Yang Web: A Unified Model for XML Syntax and RDF Semantics, was published in the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

DL Workshops

I have been an organizer of several of the Description Logics Workshops.

DLP

I have developed an experimental description logic system called DLP. This system is designed to allow various optimisations for description logic reasoning to be easily investigated. A paper on comparing these optimizations has appeared in the Journal of Logic and Computation. DLP is available on-line for non-commercial use. DLP is written in Standard ML of New Jersey, which is available from Bell Labs.

Classic

I have been the leader of the Classic group. The Classic knowledge representation systems are each full-featured knowledge representation systems based on a description logic that trades off expressive power for quick inference. Two Classic systems, one written in LISP and one written in C++, are available from Lucent. Non-commercial use requires only the signing of a simple license. Commercial use requires negotaion with Lucent.

Other Research

Talks

Recent talks on OWL and the Semantic Web

• What is OWL (and why should I give a hoot)? (Invited talk at KR 2004, June 2004)
• The Semantic Web and Knowledge Representation (Invited talk at ENC 2004, September 2004)
• Tutorial on the W3C OWL Web Ontology Language (Given at ISWC 2003 and ENC 2004; this is the ENC version.)

For more talks see my talks directory.

Selected Recent Papers

• Bijan Parsia and Peter F. Patel-Schneider OWL 2 Web Ontology Language: Primer. W3C Working Draft, 11 April 2008. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-primer/
• Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Boris Motik, and Peter Patel-Schneider. OWL 2 Web Ontology Language: XML Serialization. W3C Working Draft, 11 April 2008. http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/XML_Serialization
• Matthew Horridge and Peter F. Patel-Schneider. Manchester Syntax for OWL 1.1. OWL: Experiences and Directions 2008. Gaithersburg, MD. April 1-2, 2008.
• Boris Motik, Peter F. Patel-Schneider, and Ian Horrocks. OWL 2 Web Ontology Language: Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax. W3C Working Draft, 8 January 2008. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/
• Dmitry Tsarkov, Ian Horrocks, and Peter F. Patel-Schneider. Optimising Terminological Reasoning for Expressive Description Logics. Journal of Automated Reasoning, 39:3 (Oct. 2007), pp. 277-316.
• Peter F. Patel-Schneider and Ian Horrocks. A Comparison of Two Modelling Paradigms in the Semantic Web. Journal of Web Semantics, 5:4, 2007, pp. 240-250.
• Carey Williamson, Mary Ellen Zurko, Peter F. Patel-Schneider, Prashant Shenoy, eds. WWW'07: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on the World Wide Web. May 2007, ACM.
• Ian Horrocks, Peter F. Patel-Schneider, Deborah L. McGuinness, and Christopher A. Welty. OWL: a Description Logic Based Ontology Language for the Semantic Web. Deborah L. McGuinness and Peter F. Patel-Schneider. From Description Logic Provers to Knowledge Representation Systems. In The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation and Applications, ed. Franz Baader, Diego Calvanese, Deborah L. McGuinness, Daniele Nardi, and Peter F. Patel-Schneider. Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 2007, pp. 458--486.
• Peter F. Patel-Schneider and Ian Horrocks. Position Paper: A Comparison of Two Modelling Paradigms in the Semantic Web. The Fifteenth International World Wide Web Conference. Edinburgh, Scotland, May 2006, ACM Press.
• Richard Hull, Bharat Kumar, Daniel Lieuwen, Peter F. Patel-Schneider, Arnaud Sahuguet, Sriram Varadarajan, and Avinash Vyas. Improving User Experience Through Rule-based Service Customization. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems 14, 4, December 2005, pages 469–502.
• Building the Semantic Web Tower from RDF Straw. Nineteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Edinburgh, Scotland, August 2005.
• OWL Rules: A Proposal and Prototype Implementation. Journal of Web Semantics 3, 1, July 2005, pages 23–40.
• What is OWL (and why should I care)? Invited paper for the Ninth International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Whistler, Canada, June 2004.
• Meaning and the Semantic Web. The Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference. New York, New York, May 2004.
• A Proposal for an OWL Rules Language. The Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference. New York, New York, May 2004.
• From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: The Making of a Web Ontology Language. Journal of Web Semantics, 1:1, December 2003.
• Reducing OWL Entailment to Description Logic Satisfiability. The Second International Semantic Web Conference. Sanibel Island, Florida, October 2003.
• The Yin/Yang Web: A Unified Model for XML Syntax and RDF Semantics. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering: Special Issue on WWW2002, 15(3), July/August 2003, pages 797–812.
• A New General Method to Generate Random Modal Formulae for Testing Decision Procedures. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 18, 2003, pages 351–389.
• Three Theses of Representation in the Semantic Web. The Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference. Budapest, Hungary, May 2003.
• Layering the Semantic Web: Problems and Directions. 2002 International Semantic Web Conference. Sardinia, Italy, June 2002.
• Building the Semantic Web on XML. 2002 International Semantic Web Conference. Sardinia, Italy, June 2002.
  This paper won the best paper award at the conference.
• The Yin/Yang Web: XML Syntax and RDF Semantics The Eleventh International World Wide Web Conference. Honolulu, Hawaii, May 2002.
  This paper was one of four finalists for the best paper award at the conference.
• Two Proposals for a Semantic Web Ontology Language. 2002 International Description Logic Workshop. Toulouse, France, April 2002.
• Building the Web's Ontology Layer. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 17:2, March/April 2002, pp. 75-76.
• Reviewing the Design of DAML+OIL: An Ontology Language for the Semantic Web. Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, July 2002.
• OIL: An Ontology Infrastructure for the Semantic Web. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 16:2, May 2001.
• An Analysis of Empirical Testing for Modal Decision Procedures. Logic Journal of the IGPL, 8:3, May 2000, pages 293–324.
• ``Reducing'' CLASSIC to Practice: Knowledge Representation Theory Meets Reality. Artificial Intelligence, 114, October 1999, pages 203–237.

For more papers see my publications directory.

Personal Stuff

I have built several kinds of boats using a wood-cored fiberglass-sheathed construction, more commonly called wood strip building. This results in very nice looking lightweight but strong boats, as the fiberglass is embedded in clear epoxy with the same index of refraction and thus becomes almost invisible.

I have built a Peterborough Canadien and a Winisk canoe. I have also built two half-size models of a Prospector canoe. I recently finished building a Caspian Sea kayak. I am currently building a Delta V sailing dinghy. I have detailed descriptions of these processes, with lots of pictures.

I'm happy to chat with anyone who is interested in this building method. I'm even willing to lend out my used forms to other builders, provided appropriate payments are made to the designers.

I've done some interesting trips in the boats I've built, some of which are described on my trips page. I've also recently done some interesting bicycling around Edinburgh, Scotland, which is also described there.