Ora Lassila is a Finnish

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

who lives in the

U.S. The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous ...

and works as a technologist at

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...

. He has been conducting research into the

Semantic Web The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

since 1996, and was co-author, with

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow a ...

and James Hendler, of the article "The Semantic Web" which appeared in

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

in 2001, now the most cited paper in the Semantic Web area. His early work in this area included proposing the original RDF Specification with Ralph R. Swick and he has been an elected member of the

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

(W3C) Advisory Board since 1998. He also belongs to the steering committee of the Semantic Web Science Association. In 1996–1997, he was a visiting scientist at MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, working with W3C, and has also held positions at the Robotics Institute of

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

, as a Research Scientist at the CS Laboratory of

Helsinki University of Technology Helsinki University of Technology (TKK; ; , HUT in international usage) was a technical university in Finland. It was located in Otaniemi, Espoo in the Helsinki metropolitan area, and it was one of the three universities from which the modern d ...

, and a research fellow at the

Nokia Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, originally established as a pulp mill in 1 ...

Research Center in Cambridge, MA. His work includes a frame-based

Knowledge Representation Knowledge representation (KR) aims to model information in a structured manner to formally represent it as knowledge in knowledge-based systems whereas knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, or KR²) also aims to understand, reason, and ...

system (dubbed "SCAM") that he developed (first at HUT and later at CMU) and which flew on board the

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

Deep Space 1 probe that passed the

asteroid belt The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids ...

in 1999. The system served as the KR substrate for an on-board planner used in an experiment to have the probe perform its functions autonomously.

Bibliography

*''Programming Semantic Web Applications: A Synthesis of Knowledge Representation and Semi-Structured Data'', dissertation, 2007

References

External links

The original Resource Description Framework specifications, RDF Model and Syntax (1999 Recommendation)

The W3C Advisory Board

The Semantic Web Steering Committee

Antics with Semantics: The Innovation Interview with Semantics Pioneer, Ora Lassila
Living people Finnish computer programmers Artificial intelligence researchers Semantic Web people Finnish expatriates in the United States Year of birth missing (living people) {{europe-compu-bio-stub