Foundations for the Web of Information and Services (Repost)

In putting together this volume in honor of Professor Rudi Studer, it was realized that the origins of much of this work were somewhat obscure, and that some history would help people to understand the origins of the papers included in this volume. It was also realized that the number of the key early projects in which Rudi participated would help to make it clear that he was an important player in the founding of this important technology. By dint of being one of the other folks who was around “from the beginning,” I was asked if I would write up this brief introduction. In honor of Rudi, I’m happy to accept. I met Rudi more than 20 years ago, while I was searching for a place to do a PhD on Artificial Intelligence. Originally, I was more interested in Machine Learning but with his great spirit of non-directional leadership, Rudi slowly moved me in the direction of knowledge acquisition and knowledge engineering. What surprised me most about these areas was that they looked more like applied sociology than computer science, and only the recent web science adventure surprised me even more. Anyway, I followed his advice-for many years trying to discover what the “formal semantics” of these areas really were. After earning my PhD with Rudi and my interesting research period in Amsterdam, I really gained some insight and got excited about it. I focused on heuristic problem solvers and tried to answer the questions of why and when they are better than global problem solvers. In the end, all our life is about compromising results by restricting effort. This culminated in an exciting Habilitation that, aside from myself, very few people in the world have ever understood.