Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2015 08:21:32 -0400 From: John F Sowa To: Peter Yim Cc: Pat Hayes Peter, > Any information you may have about the Heidelberg workshop, > the SUO project, and Bob Spillers would be appreciated. Klaus Tschira, who was one of the 5 co-founders of SAP, hosted the 1998 workshop on ontology. When I checked his Wikipedia page, I discovered that KT had died earlier this year. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Tschira Until 1972, KT and the others had been working for IBM Germany, but they left to found SAP. In 1997, I was attending a conference in Germany, where I met KT, who said that he had read my 1984 book, Conceptual Structures, and found it very useful for the SAP knowledge representation methods. So he invited me to visit the research center in Heidelberg, which he had set up for the Klaus Tschira Foundation. I told KT about the ad hoc ANSI X3H4 ontology workshop that would be held at Stanford later that year. And I suggested that he might be interested. He attended that workshop and discussed the issues with various people there. After the workshop, KT met with a subset of the participants, who included Nicola Guarino, Bob Spillers, me, and several others. Bob was a recently retired former IBM manager. Since Bob and KT had both been former IBM managers, they soon established a rapport, and Bob did much of the organizing for the June 1998 workshop at Heidelberg which KT hosted. KT even paid the travel expenses for everybody who came. Those of us who participated found it a very stimulating atmosphere with lots of good discussions. Unfortunately, we never produced a publication or even a final report that KT could use as a basis to build on. Bob Spillers had also attended an organizational meeting where Jim Schoening met with many of the usual suspects to discuss the SUO project for developing an IEEE standard. As usual, Bob was one of the people who did some of the organizing. John