About the Speakers

Alan Rector , MD PhD

Alan Rector is a Professor of Medical Informatics in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and has led work on bio-medical application of ontologies since the PEN&PAD and GALEN programmes began in the late 1980s. His early work on the GRAIL representation language was an important motivation for the development of modern expressive description logics. He now leads the CO-ODE/HyOntUse team developing user-oriented ontology development tools in collaboration with the Protégé team at Stanford. With the advent of the Semantic Web his interests have broadened and he is a member of the W3C Semantic Web Best Practice Working group. He has published widely on the management of large scale terminologies and ontologies. With Ian Horrocks, he teaches an MSc module on ontology development for the Semantic Web and has given numerous workshops and tutorials for both biomedical and more general audiences. He leads the CO-ODE project and is “Knowledge Management Champion” for the JISC Committee on the Support of Research in which capacity he is organizing a series of workshops and tutorials on various aspects of ontology development throughout the UK .

Natalya F. Noy, PhD

Natasha Noy is a research scientist in the Stanford Medical Informatics laboratory at Stanford University . Her research focuses on ontology development and evaluation, semantic integration of ontologies, and making ontology-development accessible to experts in noncomputer-science domains. She ran a successful tutorial on ontology design at the First Semantic Web Working Symposium and at the annual symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association in 2003. Natasha received a PhD degree from Northeastern University concentrating on the challenges of ontology development in experimental sciences. She is currently a member of the Semantic Web Best Practices Working Group.

Mark A. Musen , MD, PhD

Mark Musen is a professor of medicine (medical informatics) and computer science at Stanford University and is head of the Stanford Medical Informatics laboratory. He conducts research related to knowledge acquisition for intelligent systems, knowledge-system architecture, and medical decision support. He is well known for his research of the application of intelligent computer systems to assist health-care workers in guideline-directed therapy and in management of clinical trials. He has directed the Protégé project since its inception in 1986, emphasizing the use of explicit ontologies and reusable problem-solving methods to build robust knowledge-based systems.

Robert Stevens

Lecturer in ontologies and HCI and leader of the Gene Ontology Annotation projects in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He leads the Gene Ontology Annotation Project (GOAT) and Gene Ontology Next Generation (GONG) projects as well as being an active member of the my Grid team. He is co-organiser of the Workshop on Bio-ongologies at the Pacific Symposium on Bio-ontologies. Robert Stevens is also an active member of the CO-ODE group and developer of the advanced bio-ontologies tutorial, as well as organiser of tutorials for a range of EU and US projects.

Supporting demonstrators

In addition to the speakers, at least two other members of the Protégé-OWL-CO-ODE team will attend to provide support and additional tuition to the attendees so that a close level of individual tuition.

Nick Drummond and Matthew Horridge

Nick Drummond and Matthew Horridge are the key researchers on the CO-ODE project which has prepared and delivered a series of tutorials and workshops as part of the UK E-Science programme. Matthew Horridge is primary editor and author of the Protégé-OWL Tutorial which has become the de facto standard text on OWL-DL. Both have extensive experience in presenting and teaching OWL and the design patterns developed in the course of the project and the OEP work.