[xml-dev] The Long and Winding Road

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

I'm posting this in the midst of the controversy of the month as a 
perspective on history, contributors, and what it often takes to 
get a technology from the heads of those that conceive it to the 
desks of those that implement it.

I was just looking at a folder of papers on my desk that included 
a paper with the following bullets:
 
"New Elements of a Strategy for Knowlege Sharing and Reuse
 
o  Standardize a canonical form (knowledge interchange format)
o  Define common ontologies (vocabularies of representational 
   terms with agreed-upon definitions in human and machine 
   readable forms)
o  Build libraries of ontologies and task-specific reasoning tools
o  Separate knowledge from programs by using a declarative 
   knowledge representation language
o  Identify general classes and relations underlying application 
   specific facets
o  Generalize reasoning and problem solving methods"
 
Source?  Semantic web?  Nope.  Berners-Lee?  Nope.
 
The DARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort.  Thomas Gruber. 
October 1991.   The membership list of the working 
group is a who's who of AI today.  I'm listing them 
here just for the record:

Tom Gruber, Stanford (co-chair)
Marty Tenenbaum, EITech, Inc (co-chair)
Danny Bobrow, Xerox
Randy Davis, MIT
Ken Forbus, Northwestern U.
Mark Fox, CMU
Pat Hayes, MCC
Ed Hovy, USC ISI
Lewis Johnson, USC ISI
Robert Kahn, NRI
Peter Karp, SRI
Jintae Lee, MIT
Doug Lenat, MCC
Bill Mark, Lockheed
Tom Malone, Xerox
Chris Overton, Unisys
Bruce Porter, U. Texas
John Sowa, IBM
Mark Stefik, Xerox
Mark Tuttle, Lexical Technologies
Brian Williams, Xerox
 
Some things take a long time to mature and when they 
do, often other people's names are associated with 
the success, but not the long long haul to get the 
concepts ready for that success.

len