Ramanathan V. Guha

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Ramanathan V. Guha (1965) is an Indian computer scientist. He graduated from Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Since May 2005, he has been working at Google.

Guha was one of the early co-leaders of the Cyc Project where he worked from 1987 through 1994 at Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation. He was responsible for the design and implementation of key parts of the Cyc system, including the CycL knowledge representation language, the upper ontological layers of the Cyc Knowledge Base and some parts of the original Cyc Natural Language understanding system..

Leaving what became Cycorp, Guha founded Q Technology, which created a database schema mapping tool called Babelfish. In 1995, he moved to work at Apple Computer, reporting to Alan Kay, where he developed the Meta Content Framework (MCF) format. In 1997 he joined Netscape Corporation where together with Tim Bray, he created a new version of MCF called Resource Description Framework (RDF), that used the XML language. Guha also contributed to the "smart browsing" features of Netscape 4.5 and was instrumental in Netscape's acquisition of the Open Directory Project. In March 1999, he created the first version of RSS as part of Netscape's personalized home page project. In 1999 he left Netscape and in May co-founded Epinions where he worked until 2000. Guha founded Alpiri in late 2000 which created TAP, a semantic web application and knowledge base. In 2002, he became a researcher at IBM Almaden Research Center. In 2005 Guha joined Google. He currently leads development of Google Custom Search.