Deborah McGuinness

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Deborah Louise McGuinness is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, specifically in knowledge representation and reasoning, description logics, the semantic web, explanation, and trust. She is a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she holds an endowed chair in the Tetherless World Research Constellation.

McGuinness received a B.S. in math and computer science from Duke University, a masters degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University. Prior to coming to Stanford, she was in the Artificial Intelligence Research Departments at AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Labs Research at Murray Hill and Florham Park, respectively. She was co-director and senior research scientist at the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. In October 2007 she became faculty at RPI, where she joined another well known semantic web expert, James Hendler on the Tetherless World Research Constellation.^[1]

McGuinness is known for her work on description logics, particularly her work on the CLASSIC knowledge representation system, explanation components for description logics, and a number of long-lived applications of description logics such as the PROSE and QUESTAR configurators from AT&T and Lucent and the wines knowledge base for CLASSIC, DAML, OWL, and the KSL Wine Agent. She is also well known in the field for co-authoring the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s recommendation for an Ontology Web Language - OWL. She also started Stanford's explanation effort,called Inference Web, that aims to provide infrastructure for improving trust and understandability of answers in distributed environments, such as the web. She is co-author of the Proof Markup Language for representing knowledge provenance.

McGuinness continues to be involved in a variety of research relating to the semantic web, trustable systems and web integration platforms for portable devices. In addition to her research activities she is also CEO and president of her own consulting firm and serves on the board of the Semantic Web Science Foundation as well as a number of startup companies.^[1]