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Carole Goble

University of Manchester

The Grid is proposed as the new distributed computing. Originally conceived as a means of sharing supercomputing resources on demand, the Grid^Ys vision and reach has rapidly evolved to intelligent middleware for ^\flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources - what we refer to as virtual organizations^].

Distributed information management and knowledge based systems are crucial and relevant to this new kid on the block. But the database community seems curiously unresponsive (with honourable exceptions) and even disinterested. They are perceived as coming late to the Semantic Web party and only recently has access to conventional databases has been incorporated into Grid middleware. Result? Examples of unnecessary and wasteful reinvention and sometimes downright muddle. And its not as if there aren^Yt research issues for information and knowledge management so its not just a case of dusting off the old papers and writing ^\Grid^] all over them.

In this tradition of communities acting as independent, and perhaps even suspicious, rival gangs, the Grid and Semantic Web pretty well ignored one another until recently. However, they are now drawing closer together through Web Services and have a new off-spring ^\the Semantic Grid^] ^S the application of knowledge technologies from the Semantic Web to both Grid applications and deep Grid infrastructure.

Wouldn^Yt it be great if the ODBASE community was in at the start of the Semantic Grid this time? It seems like a great match. How can we make it happen?

Biography

Carole Goble is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK, and has co-led the Information Management Group since 1997. Her research background is in information management, hypermedia and multimedia. In the last 14 years she has worked on metadata and knowledge-based techniques for information-based applications in medical informatics, bioinformatics and hypermedia. Her work is focused on ontology environments and ontology deployment applications, specifically the use of languages, specifically description logics, that support reasoning. Early work in medical informatics includes the EU GALEN clinical terminology project and the PEN&PAD system which used ontologies for clinical data capture and was later commercialised. Her work in ontology-based bioinformatics applications includes the ground breaking TAMBIS system (an ontology driven integration system for bioinformatics, whose ontology has been adapted as part of the US PharmGKB program), Irbane (using ontologies for gene function discovery), and the US DARPA DAML funded project GONG (redeveloping the Gene Ontology by using the DAML+OIL ontology language and reasoning tools). Recently she has been heavily involved in the UK e-Science Grid initiative and is director of one of the largest EPSRC pilots (£4million over three years), myGrid, which aims to build a personalisable platform for in silico experiments for biologists. myGrid applies Semantic Web technologies to Grid services. Prof. Goble is the co-Director of the e-Science North West regional centre and sits on the UK Office of Science and Technology eScience Programme Steering Committee. Other eScience grants she holds where she is applying Semantic Web technologies include Geodise, for optimising engineering designs. Carole is the co-chair of the Global Grid Forum Research Group on Semantic Grid, dedicated to bringing Semantic Web technologies to the Grid community. Prof Goble is highly involved with the Semantic Web activity -- her group are leading lights of the W3C WebOnt ontology language standardisation activity and co-authors of the OIL and DAML+OIL languages. She is co-investigator on a number of Semantic Web projects including EU OntoWeb thematic network primary grant holder, EU WonderWeb, and the Conceptual Open Hypermedia project COHSE which has received follow-on funds from Sun Microsystems. She sits on the steering boards of the OntoWeb EU Thematic Network, the Semantic Web Science Association and the BioOntologies Consortium. She is an Editor in Chief of a new Elsevier Journal of Semantic Web and runs the editorial office of this journal. She was the chair of the first Semantic Web track at the WWW2002 conference, where she also participated on a panel on Semantic Grids.