passing the helm

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Date: Sun, 9 Oct 94 22:35:42 PDT
From: gruber@smi.stanford.edu (Tom Gruber)
Message-id: <9410100535.AA18084@hpp-ss10-1.Stanford.EDU.ksl>
To: srkb@cs.umbc.edu, ontolingua@HPP.Stanford.EDU
Subject: passing the helm
Reply-To: gruber@HPP.Stanford.EDU

Colleagues,

As many of you know, I'm leaving Stanford to join Enterprise Integration
Technologies, a rapidly growing company in the internet business.
As a consequence, I will no longer be chairing the SRKB working group,
working on ontolingua, or maintaining the knowledge sharing library.

However, the work will continue under the direction of Professor Richard
Fikes, who heads the Stanford KSL.  The new person with whom to correspond
about ontology library issues is 
    ontology-librarian@ksl.stanford.edu.

I've enjoyed working with many of you on the knowledge sharing front.  The
irony of my departure is that the ontology library is about to double in size,
with sophisticated contributions from groups all over the world.  There are
also new, exciting applications of ontologies offered by the emerging global
information network: agents, brokers, peer-peer services, etc.  I think it's
fair to say that the idea of ontologies as specification for knowledge sharing
is being applied in a lot of places, with or without that label.

In the past month, I've written some documentation (on the web, of course)
that will help smooth the transition to new people coordinating the work.
There is now a "what's new" page in the knowledge sharing library where new
things will be announced.  There are about a dozen ontologies in preparation,
that should appear in a month or so. 

The new documentation, and the old, is all there on the World Wide Web at

http://ksl-web.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/

Attached is a text version of the what's new page.  To get the links, 
get the WWW version!

tom


                 WHAT'S NEW IN THE KNOWLEDGE SHARING LIBRARY?
                                       
  October 9, 1994         Tom Gruber announces that he is leaving Stanford to
                         join EIT.  The ontology library will be maintained by
                         ontology-librarian@ksl.stanford.edu.

  
   October 9, 1994        Procedure for contributing new ontologies is
                         published.

  
   October 7, 1994        Procedures for maintenance of the Knowledge Sharing
                         Library at the KSL are automated and published.

  
   October 7, 1994        The What's New page for the Knowledge Sharing Library
                         is started.

  
   October 6, 1994        There's now an exhaustive index of all the words
                         defined in all the ontologies in the ontology library.
                          The code for doing this was written by Wanda.  
                         It's part of ontolingua, but unreleased.

  
   October 5, 1994        A Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file for
                         Ontolingua is started.

  
   September 27, 1994     New release of the VT ontologies in html.
                         Incorporated changes  recommended by the KA community.
                          See the changes document for details.

  
   September, 1994        Changed look and feel of html reports slightly, based
                         on UI designer comments.
                         
   
   This page is maintained by ontology-librarian@ksl.stanford.edu.