John Walker

I got interested in ontologies back in the 1990s while working on my MLS Degree at the University of Maryland. I subsequently brought that interest with me to my U.S. government job at the Department of Defense where I worked for the next twenty years or so. In 2000, I was selected to participate in an independent fellowship program. My project focused on learning about ontologies and thinking about how they might be used to support DoD activities. During that period, I got to travel around the country and meet many/most of the leaders in the field at that time. I am also chagrined to admit I created my email user name then. After the fellowship, among other things I was the program manager on one of DoDs early attempts to actual apply ontologies on a large scale on real-world DoD problem sets.

I retired from the federal government in 2015 but recently started dabbling on editing Wikidata items.