Ontolog Forum
Michael Wessel
Michael Wessel is a Computer Scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International, Menlo Park, California. He is interested in applying ontologies and knowledge representation and reasoning to real-world application problems. Recently, he developed an ontology-based dialogue management system for SRI's virtual personal assistant platform. He was also a member of SRI's AURA / HALO project, funded by Paul Allen, where he contributed to the maintenance and extension of the KR&R and question answering backends.
Before coming to SRI, Michael was a co-founder and developer for "Racer Systems" GmbH, in Hamburg, Germany. The company's OWL and description logic reasoner "RacerPro" was among the most widely used and known description logic and OWL reasoners of the first decade of this century. There, he developed the nRQL description logic and OWL query language, semantic web infrastructure, and an ontology workbench (RacerPorter). He also worked as a research and teaching assistant for the Hamburg University of Technology, and the University of Hamburg, where he was involved in a number of large-scale projects on ontologies and reasoning, funded by the European Commission.
Michael holds a PhD (Dr. rer. nat) in computer science from the Hamburg University of Technology, and a diploma in computer science from the University of Hamburg. His dissertation was in the context of ontology-based information systems, where he employed ontologies for query answering in spatial information systems (GIS), as well as for retrieval in the Semantic Web.
His current research interests include large-scale knowledge graphs, as well as ontology- and knowledge graph-learning from the web, such that the knowledge acquisition bottleneck of traditional symbolic systems can be alleviated by acquiring "knowledge from the web".