Ramanathan V. Guha (born 1965) is the creator of widely used web standards such as

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...

, RDF and

Schema.org Schema.org is a reference website that publishes documentation and guidelines for using structured data mark-up on web-pages (called microdata). Its main objective is to standardize HTML tags to be used by webmasters for creating rich results (di ...

. He is also responsible for products such as

Google Custom Search Google Programmable Search Engine (formerly known as Google Custom Search and Google Co-op) is a platform provided by Google that allows web developers to feature specialized information in web searches, refine and categorize queries and create ...

. He was a co-founder of

Epinions Epinions.com was a general consumer review site established in 1999. Epinions was acquired in 2003 by DealTime, later Shopping.com, which was acquired by eBay in 2005. Epinions users could access reviews about a variety of items. On 25 March 20 ...

and Alpiri. He currently works at Google as a Google Fellow.

Education

Guha did his schooling from Loyola High School,

Pune Pune (; ; also known as Poona, ( the official name from 1818 until 1978) is one of the most important industrial and educational hubs of India, with an estimated population of 7.4 million As of 2021, Pune Metropolitan Region is the largest i ...

and graduated with

Bachelor of Technology A Bachelor of Technology (Latin ''Baccalaureus Technologiae'', commonly abbreviated as B.Tech. or BTech; with honours as B.Tech. (Hons.)) is an undergraduate academic degree conferred after the completion of a three to five-year program of studi ...

Mechanical Engineering Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and mathematics principles with materials science, to design, analyze, manufacture, an ...

from the

Indian Institute of Technology Madras Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) is a public technical university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. As one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), it is recognized as an Institute of National Importance and has bee ...

Master of Science A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast to ...

from

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

and Ph.D from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...

Career

Guha was one of the early co-leaders of the

Cyc Cyc (pronounced ) is a long-term artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc f ...

Project where he worked from 1987 through 1994 at

Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, originally the Microelectronics and Computer Consortium and widely seen as the acronym MCC, was the first, and at one time one of the largest, computer industry research and development con ...

in collaboration with

Douglas Lenat Douglas Bruce Lenat (born 1950) is the CEO of Cycorp, Inc. of Austin, Texas, and has been a prominent researcher in artificial intelligence; he was awarded the biannual IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1976 for creating the machine learning p ...

. He was responsible for the design and implementation of key parts of the Cyc system, including the

CycL CycL in computer science and artificial intelligence is an ontology language used by Doug Lenat's Cyc artificial intelligence project. Ramanathan V. Guha was instrumental in the design of early versions of the language. There is a close var ...

knowledge representation Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medic ...

language, the upper ontological layers of the Cyc Knowledge Base and some parts of the original Cyc Natural Language understanding system. Leaving what became

Cycorp Cyc (pronounced ) is a long-term artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc f ...

, Guha founded Q Technology, which created a database schema mapping tool called Babelfish. In 1994, he moved to work at

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

, reporting to

Alan Kay Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) des ...

, where he developed the

Meta Content Framework Meta Content Framework (MCF) is a specification of a content format for structuring metadata about web sites and other data. History MCF was developed by Ramanathan V. Guha at Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group between 1995 and 1997. Root ...

(MCF) format. In 1997 he joined

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...

where, in collaboration with

Tim Bray Timothy William Bray (born June 21, 1955) is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 ...

, he created a new version of MCF that used the

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

language and which became the main technical precursor to W3C's

Resource Description Framework The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of ...

(RDF) standard. Guha also contributed to the "smart browsing" features of Netscape 4.5 and was instrumental in Netscape's acquisition of NewHoo, which Netscape rebranded the Open Directory Project. He created the first version of

as part of a move in which the My.Netscape

portal Portal often refers to: *Portal (architecture), an opening in a wall of a building, gate or fortification, or the extremities (ends) of a tunnel Portal may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Gaming * ''Portal'' (series), two video games ...

was opened to wider participation in March 1999. In 1999 he left Netscape and in May co-founded

, where he worked until 2000. Guha founded Alpiri in late 2000 which created TAP, a semantic web application and knowledge base. In 2002, he became a researcher at

IBM Almaden Research Center IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research or ...

. In 2005 Guha joined

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. I ...

and became a Google Fellow. While at Google he has been responsible for

and a number of enhancements to

Adwords Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers bid to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, or videos to web users. It can place ads both in the result ...

. He is also one of the founders of

Awards

On January 26, 2013, Guha was named as a Distinguished Alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. December 8, 2015 named as a

ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing ...

br>''for contributions to structured data representation and specification and their impact on the Web''

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Guha, Ramanathan V. Apple Inc. employees Google employees Google Fellows IBM employees Living people 1965 births Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery