Ontologies for the Enterprise

As Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe Systems, Duane Nickull is responsible for Adobe’s messaging around enterprise solutions in the SOA and Web Services spaces plus other forward looking aspects such as the Web 2.0. Previously Mr. Nickull co-founded Yellow Dragon Software Corporation, a privately held developer of XML messaging and metadata management software, acquired by Adobe in 2003. He previously served as CTO and President of XML Global Technologies, a publicly traded company acquired by Xenos Group in early 2003. Mr. Nickull has written or participated in most of the larger SOA standards work in the past decade. He currently chairs the OASIS Service Oriented Architecture Reference Model Technical Committee (SOA-RM TC) which has just delivered a Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture as a full OASIS standard. He served as a Vice Chair of the United Nations Centre for Facilitation of Commerce and Trade (UN/CEFACT) between 2003 and 2006. Within the United Nations, he oversaw the UN’s Electronic Business strategy and Service Oriented Architecture and modeling efforts. He has served as the project team lead of the United Nations (UN/CEFACT) Electronic Business Architecture Group (SOA) and a specially appointed liaison between the W3C, UN and OASIS standards consortiums. Additionally, Duane has served as the chair and lead system architect for the United Nation’s Electronic Business Working Group, a direct sub-group of CEFACT TMG and on the CEFACT TMG Steering Committee. He also has served as the Co-chair of the ebXML Technical Architecture group as well as co-editor of that specification starting in 1999, largely recognized as the first post-internet and post XML SOA. He has participated in writing many of the recent large Service Oriented Architectures that permeate the IT landscape today such as the W3C Web Services Architecture and also co wrote the Mackenzie-Nickull Meta-model for Architectural Patterns. Mr. Nickull has written and contributed many technical articles and books on these subjects Mr. Nickull has been called Mr. SOA by his peers during introductions to speak on the subject due to his overwhelming experience writing and contributing to the major Service Oriented Architectures (SOA’s). Between 1995 and 2006, he spoke at over 500 venues in various countries around the world Duane has recently renewed his work in the theoretical field of computational intelligence and has recently spoken several times to various audiences via the Ontolog Forum on eventcausality aware inference engines coupled to a query-able ontology. Such mechanisms may one day bestow true cognitive and reasoning capabilities upon applications. In the field of semantic reconciliation, Duane was a co-inventor of the first Context-sensitive XML Search Engine (www.goxml.com) and the first web based XML E-Commerce ASP. He is named on pending patents pertaining to XML indexing and retrieval covering 51 unique points. He also served as Technical Director for XSLT.com during the 1990’s until as recently as 2002. He lives in Vancouver, Canada with his wife and three children, plays in a rock band, actively snowboards, races Porsche 911’s and mountain bikes. Duane first came to Vancouver playing in an original band in 1985 and made his living as a professional musician for several years.

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