Natasha Fridman Noy (also known as Natasha Noy or Natalya Fridman Noy) is a Russian-born American research scientist at Google Research in Mountain View, California, who focuses on making structured data more accessible and usable.^[4,5,6,2,3] She earned a BS from Moscow State University, an MS from Boston University, and a PhD from Northeastern University in 1997 with the dissertation "Knowledge representation for intelligent information retrieval in experimental sciences".

Before joining Google, she worked at Stanford University's Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, where she made significant contributions to ontology building and alignment, collaborative ontology engineering, and the Protégé ontology editor.^[8] At Google, she is the team leader for Google Dataset Search, a web-based search engine for all datasets, and her broader research areas include the Semantic Web, ontologies, structured data, and data integration.^{[4,5,6,2,3,7]}

She served as the president of the Semantic Web Science Association from 2011 to 2017, is its Immediate Past President, and sits on the editorial boards of many Semantic Web and Information Systems publications.^[8,7] Noy was named an AAAI Fellow in 2020 and an ACM Fellow in 2023.

Natasha Noy earned a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics from Moscow State University, a master's degree in computer science from Boston University, and a doctorate from Northeastern University.^[1] Her thesis focused on knowledge-rich documents, in particular information retrieval for scientific articles.^[9]

Noy moved from Northeastern to Stanford University to work with Mark Musen on the Protégé ontology editor as a postdoctoral researcher, and later as a research scientist. It was at Stanford that she completed her important work on Prompt, an environment for automated ontology alignment, which was published in 2002.^[10] For recognizing the specifics of the problem and providing an inventive solution, this study received the AAAI classic paper award in 2018. By far her most widely distributed work, however, was the Ontology 101 tutorial, which Noy developed as part of the education program for Protégé customers; the tutorial became a standard introductory document for the semantic web and ontologies, has been cited nearly 6,800 times as of 2018, and has been downloaded often.^[1]

In April 2014, Noy went to Google Research, and Google has released a search engine to help researchers find publicly available online data. The program was launched on September 5, and it is aimed towards "scientists, data journalists, data geeks, or anybody else." Dataset Search, which is now following Google's other specialized search engines including news and picture search, as well as Google Scholar and Google Books, locates files and databases based on how their owners have categorised them. It does not read the content of the files in the same manner that search engines read web pages.^[7]

According to Natasha Noy, researchers who want to know what kinds of data are accessible or who want to find data that they already know exists must often rely on word of mouth, a problem that Noy notes is particularly acute for early-career academics who have yet to "connect" into a network of professional ties. In January 2017, Noy and her Google colleague Dan Brickley wrote a blog post proposing a solution to the problem. Typical search engines operate in two stages: the first stage is to search the Internet for sites to index on a regular basis, and the second stage is to rank those indexed sites so that the engine can return relevant results in order when a user puts in a search word. Owners of datasets should 'tag' them using a standardized vocabulary called Schema.org. According to Noy and Brickley, Google and three other search engine behemoths (Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex) created Schema.org to help search engines in scanning existing data sets.^[7]

Noy is best known for her work on the Protégé ontology editor and the Prompt alignment tool, for which she and co-author Mark Musen received the AAAI Classic Paper award in 2018, an award that honors the author(s) of the most influential paper(s) from a specific conference year, with the time period examined advancing by one year per year. She was elected an AAAI Fellow in 2020 and an ACM Fellow in 2023.^[11,12]