Things I've Written

Selected Publications and a Few Self Published Works

CODO: An Ontology for Collection and Analysis of Covid-19 Data

August 7, 2020

Universal Moral Grammar (UMG) Ontology

August 1, 2018

This reflects my interest in studying human ethics via cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. The short version of the paper was published at the Semantics 2018 conference in Vienna. The short published paper, a longer version, and the ontology can be found on this blog post: Universal Moral Grammar Ontology.

A Critique of Foot's Natural Goodness

March, 2017

As part of my research for the Universal Moral Grammar ontology I audited an excellent philosophy class on ethics at UC Berkeley taught by professor R. Jay Wallace. One of the books we read was Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness. I had significant issues with the position Foot took in the book which I documented in the following brief unpublished paper: A Critique of Foot's Natural Goodness.

Knowledge-Based Software Assistant Concept Demo Final Report

April, 1993

This is a bit dated but it's one of the most interesting projects I've worked on. The Knowledge-Based Software Assistant (KBSA) was a vision that the US Air Force had for a next generation CASE tool based on knowledge-based technology and formal methods. Our project at Accenture was one of the first to take the ideas and demonstrate them in a system that could be used on actual development. We used the system to bootstrap itself, everything was defined in the specification language. Also, it was a real privilege to work with the excellent team at Accenture's CSTaR R&D lab, especially Mike Evangelist who was my boss at the time and was a mentor and dear friend. KBSA Concept Demo Final Report.

Additional Publications

For additional publications please see my Academia.edu page.

My initial interest in OWL was primarily as a modeling tool. That is how I used it in the paper I published on a Universal Moral Grammar at Semantics 2018. Recently I have been working with Knowledge Graphs which is more or less the same technology, however the emphasis is on very large data not simply models. For such data an actual triplestore (a special database designed to store knowledge graphs) is needed. I've been using the Allegro Graph product from Franz Inc. This paper describes work that I'm currently doing with a colleague at the Indian Statistical Institute: professor Biswanath Dutta. We've developed an ontology called CODO for data from the Indian government on the Covid-19 pandemic.