William A. Martin

Timeline

1. 1960–1962

   Electrical engineering at MIT

   A native of Oklahoma City, he earns his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at MIT in 1960 and his master's degree in 1962.

2. 1967

   A PhD under Minsky

   He earns a PhD in electrical engineering at MIT in 1967 under Marvin Minsky. His dissertation, Symbolic Mathematical Laboratory, circulates as an MIT electrical engineering technical report dated January 1967.

3. 1968–1971

   Launching the Macsyma project

   He joins the MIT faculty in 1968 with a joint appointment at the Sloan School and the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. Macsyma, a computer algebra system, starts in July 1968 at Project MAC with Martin working on the front end, expression display and polynomial arithmetic alongside Carl Engelman and Joel Moses, and he is in charge of the project until 1971. Maxima, derived from the DOE version of Macsyma, is released under the GPL in 1999.

4. 1970s

   Developing the OWL language

   In the early 1970s, he begins developing OWL, a knowledge representation language at Project MAC that supports research on automatic programming, natural language understanding, business modeling and medical diagnosis. By 1975, he heads the Laboratory for Computer Science's natural language and automatic programming research and discusses automatic programming of inventory control systems with Arnoldo C. Hax of the Sloan School of Management.

5. 1972–1975

   Associate professor with tenure

   He is promoted to associate professor in July 1972 and receives academic tenure in 1975.

6. June 1977

   An Overview of OWL

   In June 1977, he coauthors the technical memo An Overview of OWL, A Language for Knowledge Representation with Peter Szolovits and Lowell B. Hawkinson. It describes OWL as a memory of concepts, a theory of English grammar, a parser and an interpreter, applied to interactive dialogs, explanations of its own reasoning and question answering.

7. 1980–1981

   Posthumous promotion to professor

   He falls ill in 1980 and dies at his home in Brookline in June 1981, aged 43. MIT promotes him to full professor after his death.

8. 2002

   The OWL name revived

   In 2002, Peter Szolovits is asked whether the name OWL can be reused for a new formal knowledge representation language in support of the Semantic Web, and he calls it a fitting tribute to Martin's work in knowledge representation.