John F. Sowa

After early retirement at IBM Sowa in 2001 cofounded VivoMind Intelligence, Inc. with Arun K. Majumdar. With this company he was developing data-mining and database technology, more specific high-level "ontologies" for artificial intelligence and automated natural language understanding. Currently Sowa is working with Kyndi Inc., also founded by Majumdar.

In the 1980s, this theory had "been adopted by a number of research and development groups throughout the world. International conferences on conceptual structures (ICCS) have been held since 1993, following a series of conceptual graph workshops that began in 1986.

Sowa invented conceptual graphs, a graphic notation for logic and natural language, based on the structures in semantic networks and on the existential graphs of Charles S. Peirce. He published the concept in the 1976 article "Conceptual graphs for a data base interface" in the IBM Journal of Research and Development. He further explained in the 1983 book Conceptual structures: information processing in mind and machine.

Sowa's research interest since the 1970s were in the field of artificial intelligence, expert systems and database query linked to natural languages. In his work he combines ideas from numerous disciplines and eras modern and ancient, for example, applying ideas from Aristotle, the medieval Scholastics to Alfred North Whitehead and including database schema theory, and incorporating the model of analogy of Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyyah in his works.

Sowa received a BS in mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962, an MA in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1966, and a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1999 on a dissertation titled "Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical, and Computational Foundations".

Sowa spent most of his professional career at IBM, which started in 1962 at IBM's applied mathematics group. Over the decades he has researched and developed emerging fields of computer science from compilers, programming languages, and system architecture to artificial intelligence and knowledge representation. In the 1990s Sowa was associated with IBM Educational Center in New York. Over the years he taught courses at the IBM Systems Research Institute, Binghamton University, Stanford University, the Linguistic Society of America and the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

John Florian Sowa (born 1940) is an American computer scientist, an expert in artificial intelligence and computer design, and the inventor of conceptual graphs.