Tom Gruber

CTO

Siri, Inc.

San Jose, California, USA.

email: onto-at-tomgruber.org

Tom Gruber is a researcher and entrepreneur with a focus on systems for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and collective intelligence. He did foundational work in ontology engineering and is well-known for his definition of ontologies in the context of Artificial Intelligence. The approaches and technologies from this work are precursors to the infrastructure for today's Semantic Web. At Stanford University in the early 1990's, Tom was a pioneer in the use of the Web for collaboration and knowledge sharing. He invented HyperMail, a widely-used open source application that turns email conversations into collective memories, which chronicled many of the early discussions that helped define the Web. He built ontology engineering tools and established the first web-based public exchange for ontologies, software, and knowledge bases. During the rise of the Web, Dr. Gruber founded Intraspect, an enterprise software company that pioneered the space of collaborative knowledge management. Intraspect applications help professional people collaborate in large distributed communities, continuously contributing to a collective body of knowledge. For the Web 2.0 era, he co-founded RealTravel.com, which aspires to be the best place on the web to share knowledge and experiences about travel. Realtravel provides an environment for a community of travel enthusiasts to create beautiful travel journals of their adventures, share them with friends and family, and learn from other like-minded travelers. With techniques for combining structured data with user contributions, and a machine-learning based recommendation engine, it is also an example of collective intelligence in both the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 senses of the word.

See also:

• http://tomgruber.org/

• Dr. Tom Gruber's invited talk to the Ontolog community
  • on "Grande Challenges for Ontology Design" at ConferenceCall_2007_03_01
  • and his keynote address for the OntologySummit2007_Symposium

• Experiment in peer authoring of a document called OntologyDistinctions - distinguising properties of computational ontologies by people who build and use them.