% The abstractpage environment sets up everything on the page except
% the text itself.  The title and other header material are put at the
% top of the page, and the supervisors are listed at the bottom.  A
% new page is begun both before and after.  Of course, an abstract may
% be more than one page itself.  If you need more control over the
% format of the page, you can use the abstract environment, which puts
% the word "Abstract" at the beginning and single spaces its text.

%% You can either \input (*not* \include) your abstract file, or you can put
%% the text of the abstract directly between the \begin{abstractpage} and
%% \end{abstractpage} commands.

% First copy: start a new page, and save the page number.
\cleardoublepage
% Uncomment the next line if you do NOT want a page number on your
% abstract and acknowledgments pages.
%\pagestyle{empty}
\setcounter{savepage}{\thepage}
\begin{abstractpage}
%%The problem of graduating in a time $t \in \mathbb{N}$ years is thought to be unsolvable. The techniques of procrastinating were attempted, and shown to not be usable to accomplish a positive result. Results of writing abstracts remained inconclusive, and need further study. 


%%% Gerry's Abstract Form
%%% What was the problem?
Dealing with data in open, distributed environments is an increasingly
important problem today. The processing of heterogeneous data in
formats such as RDF is still being researched. Using rules and rule
engines is one technique that is being used. In doing so, the problem of handling
heterogeneous rules from multiple sources becomes important.
%%% What theoretical, experimental, and computational steps did *you* take?
Over the course of this
thesis, I wrote several kinds of reasoners including backward,
forward, and hybrid reasoners for RDF rule languages. These were used
for a variety of problems and data in a wide range of settings for
solving real world problems. 
%%% What were the results of *your* work?
During my investigations, I learned
several interesting problems of RDF. First, simply making the term
space big and well namespaced and the language low enough expressivity
did not make computation necessarily easier. Next, checking proofs in
an RDF environment proved to be hard because the basic features of RDF
that make it possible for it to represent heterogeneous data
effectively make proofs difficult. Further work is needed to see if
some of these problems can be mitigated. Though rules are useful, using rules correctly and efficiently for processing RDF data proved to be difficult. 

\end{abstractpage}



