Chris Welty

Christopher A. Welty is an American computer scientist, who works at Google Research in NY. He is best known for his work on ontologies, in the Semantic Web, and on IBM's Watson. While on sabbatical from Vassar College in 1999-2000, he collaborated with Nicola Guarino on ; he was co-chair of the W3C Rule Interchange Format working group from 2005-2009.

Dr. Welty is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, (RPI) where he worked for the Free Software Foundation on version 16-18 of GNU Emacs as well as the formation of NYSERNet during the emergence of the InterNet. This synergy of interests made him an early public figure in AI, as he moderated the "NL-KR Digest" and the corresponding comp.ai.nlang-know-rep newsgroup (now defunct), which was at the time the widest vehicle for dissemination of announcements and moderated discussion in the natural language and knowledge representation communities. He later became the editor in chief of intelligence Magazine (sic), published by ACM. This magazine was published in place of the SIGART Bulletin from 1999-2001.

Welty began to make his first scientific contributions in the early 1990s, when he emerged as a leading figure in the Automated Software Engineering community, whose on-line bibliography lists his 1995 paper as one of the best papers that year (this would be the year he finished his PhD), becoming in each successive year the program chair, general chair, and steering committee chair of that conference.

His PhD work focused on extending the work of Prem Devanbu at AT&T on Lassie with a better developed ontology. After his PhD, he moved to Vassar College, where his work shifted away from Software Engineering and towards ontology. In 1998, he published seminal work on the analysis of subjects in library information systems, dispelling the widely held myth at the time (which is now resurfacing) that subject taxonomies are ontologies.

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