Executive Director

In my introduction to this year’s conference I will address six questions that I believe come to the core of our conference theme of interoperability. Do we human beings resist change? Is it in fact a human problem and not a technical problem that we are dealing with? Can non-human intelligence exist? Do we even have a need for intelligent software? How did software, particularly intelligent software (i.e., if we accept that there is such a thing) evolve over the past several decades, and what is all this talk about a Semantic Web environment? And, finally, what does the future hold in the next five to ten years? Fig.1: “…it was the best of times… ” Fig.2: “…it was the worst of times…” I would like to start by paraphrasing one of my favorite authors, Charles Dickens. Many of you will recall that in The Tale of Two Cities, he started off the entire book with a long paragraph that began with the words: "...it was the best of times, it was the worst of times... " These are words that I believe apply very much today. We are in the best of times, because information technology and computers have become a useful partner and enabler that bring us very powerful capabilities. To mention only a few (Fig.1), we have