Persistent URLs (PURLs) have operated on the Internet since 1995, and were re-architected and described at SemTech in 2008. Part of the re-architecture was to add semantic capabilities to PURLs so that metadata descriptions of a resource may be computationally separated from resources themselves. The Open Source community at http://purlz.org maintains and extends the PURL code base.

Active PURLs extend the PURL concept. Active PURLs actively participate in the creation or gathering of metadata that describes their target URL. Using principles of Representational State Transfer (REST), implementation details are hidden behind a PURL’s URL. Any form of query mechanism may be used to implement an Active PURL. This talk, however, will introduce an Active PURL builder that uses the SPARQL query language for RDF.

Active PURLs using SPARQL may be used in a manner analogous to stored procedures for relational databases. SPARQL’s distributed query capabilities may be used to gather information from across the World Wide Web and present results at a single, persistent URL. Active PURLs with SPARQL thus treat the Web like a database. Examples are presented using FOAF ("What are my friends’ current telephone numbers?"), Dublin Core/RDFa ("Who authored updates to the Web pages I track?") and GeoNames/SKOS ("Find known places in a postal code", which demonostrates parameterization).

Attachment: Active PURLs – Stored Procedures for the Semantic Web.mp3 (40.43 MB)

Presenters:

David Wood
Zepheira

David Wood is a partner with Zepheira and software engineer/entrepreneur specializing in disruptive technologies. He is a co-founder of the Kowari, Mulgara and PURLZ Open Source Software projects. Dr. Wood has been involved with Semantic Web research and standards efforts since 1999.

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In this "Late-Breaking News" session, representatives from Google, Inc. discuss the company’s recent announcements about semantic web technologies and ongoing initiatives.

Attachment: Semantics at Google – RFDa, Microformats, and More.mp3 (38.55 MB)

Presenters:

Othar Hansson
Google, Inc.

Othar Hansson is Technical Lead for the Microformats initiatives at Google.

Kavi Goel
Google, Inc.

Kavi Goel is Rich Snippets Product Manager at Google.

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In this talk we will report on using semantic technologies in implementing tools for enterprise information management and decision support systems. We have built proof-of-concept software tools that assist knowledge workers in making sense of information within the context of some business processes.

The OWL ontology language is used to implement domain-independent as well as domain-specific models for guiding the process of gathering and filtering relevant information. RDF is used to represent a complex data structure for organizing and arranging relevant information. A semantic query and inference engine is used in formulating hypotheses about possible ways that the information gathered may explain the situation at hand. Alternative hypotheses are compared and ranked via probabilistic reasoning. The combination of these capabilities result in assisting knowledge workers in making sense of large volumes of information, connecting the dots, explaining events, and making informed decisions.

Attachment: Making Sense of Information with Semantic Technologies.mp3 (56.65 MB)

Presenters:

Cirrus Shakeri
SAP Labs

Cirrus Shakeri is a senior research scientist at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, CA. He has made a career for himself in bringing scientific theories into practice and turning new discoveries into products. He has extensive industry experience in Engineering, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Business Process Management (BPM). His focus at SAP Research is on discovering methods and tools for empowering business users of the SAP products and especially the applications of semantic technologies in harnessing information to create actionable knowledge and providing the context for optimum decision making. His research interests are in applications of AI, intelligent software agents, knowledge management, semantic technologies, sensemaking, and cognitive computing. He received a PhD in AI and Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts in 1998. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society.

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The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian has embarked on an ambitious effort to migrate its diplomatic history document archive from paper to an enriched electronic media for online consumption. We have extremely high standards for semantic precision and accuracy, due to Congressional mandates, which makes this unique resource useful to a broad audience, which includes scholars, government officials, and the general public. Furthermore, the new format allows us to repurpose our content and integrate it with "mashup" applications such as timelines and geographical map views.

This case study reviews the U.S. State Department’s requirements and the decision process that led us to adopt high-precision semantic markup standards that are supported by our tools as well as by our vendors. We will review our requirements and decision-making, and will show concrete examples of how the precise identifiers for people, locations, and events allow us to enrich the display of our documents online.

We will also review the full document lifecycle and the need for automated but high quality entity extraction tools to minimize document conversion costs. This case study will discuss some of the tradeoffs others may face when advanced technology decisions have both risks and rewards for the digital historian.

In this presentation we will:

• Review business requirements for a high precision entity extraction application
• Describe our semantic approach
• Demonstrate entity extraction
• Demonstrate timeline and other mashups
• Summarize project benefits

Attachment: High Precision Entity Extraction – A US State Department Case Study.mp3 (54.54 MB)

Presenters:

Joe Wicentowski

After completing a Fulbright grant in Asia for his doctoral research and receiving his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, Joseph C. Wicentowski joined the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Historian. He has taken a leadership role in digital history management as a digital historian, developing new digital formats for the Department’s archive of U.S. diplomatic and foreign affairs documents, which reach back to the founding of the historian’s office in 1861. He has led development of a new website for these documents, based on a native XML database, and is working to bring the benefits of data visualization, metadata management, and other digital history applications to the federal government and the public. He has particular interests in XML, XQuery, and U.S. and Chinese history.

Dan McCreary

Dan is an enterprise data architect/strategist living in Minneapolis. He has worked for organizations such as Bell Labs and Steve Job’s NeXT Computer as well as founding his own consulting firm of over 75 people. He has a background in object-oriented programming and declarative XML languages (XSLT, XML Schema design, XForms, XQuery, RDF, and OWL). He has published articles on various technology topics including the Semantic Web, metadata registries, enterprise integration strategies, XForms, and XQuery. He is author of the XForms Tutorial and Cookbook.

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Two major causes for optimism in the Semantic Technologies community are: 1) the rapid growth in the availability of open (linkable) structured datasets and associated ontologies, and 2) the belief that shared representation schemata will enable ontology integration and data sharing. Increasing pairwise linkages, as reflected especially at the dataset (instance) level by the growth of the Linked Open Data Cloud, offers evidence to support this optimism.

This apparent smooth sailing arises in part, from the relatively simplicity, and in some cases lack of precision, of the representation of the content and ontologies being merged. While this simplicity is beneficial in making such linkages possible, it can hide some symptoms of underlying problems that would best be revealed and addressed sooner rather than later. Alas, there may be some bumpy skies ahead. Over the past year, Cycorp has made a concerted effort to link the Cyc ontology to a number of external structured datasets and ontologies, taxonomies, and thesauri. This experience has revealed several areas in which knowledge representation issues in many current data sources and ontologies have been addressed non-uniformly, sub-optimally, or not at all. This presentation will examine some of these representational challenges, with an emphasis on their impact on ontology integration as well as a focus on suggestions for representational improvement.

Attachment: Turbulence in the Linked Open Data and Ontology Clouds.mp3 (51.91 MB)

Presenters:

Larry Lefkowitz
Cycorp

Larry received his PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts and has been with Cycorp since 2004, where he is responsible for the successful application of the Cyc technology. In addition to his business development role, Larry oversees several Cyc projects including the ResearchCyc initiative.

Prior to joining Cycorp, Larry had led numerous knowledge-based system programs in both academia and industry. He co-founded the Laboratory for Computer-Supported Cooperative Work at the University of Massachusetts, where he directed research in the areas of artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, planning, and plan recognition. While with Bellcore’s Computer Technology Transfer organization, Larry led the development of a state-of-the-art Intelligent Tutoring System. In addition to his research and technology development efforts, Larry has consulted globally to assist companies in implementing technology-based solutions. He is the author of numerous technical publications and book chapters in Computer and Information Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Intelligent Tutoring Systems.

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We will review the state of semantic technologies as a business, discuss the near future, and exchange suggestions with entrepreneurs in the space. In particular, marketing semantic applications presents a challenging paradox: attracting early-adopters by promoting Semantic technology alienates main stream consumers; and, marketing toward mainstream consumers creates disinterest with early-adopters.

Key questions we’ll tackle:

• What semantic technologies are market-ready?
• Where and how have these technologies infiltrated and impacted existing industries?
• What problems do these solutions solve?
• What other problems can they be expected to tackle soon?
• What business models already work? What others do we see emerging?
• How to improve the overlap between semantic technologies and real needs?
• How to bring new semantic apps to market successfully

Attachment: Panel – Business Models and Market Opportunities for Semantic Start-ups.mp3 (59.54 MB)

Presenters:

Greg Boutin
GrowthRoute Ventures

Greg Boutin is the founder of GrowthRoute Ventures, through which he helps tech ventures go to market, raise funding and scale their operations. Greg blogs at SemanticsIncorporated.com and is a regular member of the Semantic Web Gang podcast. Previously, Greg worked as a marketing director for a web venture in concept extraction and served as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. Greg received an MBA from Stanford University. He lives in Ontario, Canada, and currently assists a number of semantic technology companies across North America and overseas.

Fraser Kelton
AdaptiveBlue Inc

Fraser has spent his career bringing emerging technologies to market. Currently Fraser is the VP, Business Development at AdaptiveBlue, a leading consumer-facing semantic web company. Previously to joining AdaptiveBlue, Fraser was a member of Trivaris, a seed stage investment firm specializing in the commercialization of new technology. Fraser has spoken at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo, DowJones VentureOne Summit, Add-on-Con and other national technology conferences.

William Mougayar
Eqentia, Inc.

William Mougayar is the founder and CEO of Eqentia, a semantic aggregation platform that enables the rapid customization of knowledge dashboards allowing users to productively consume, find and correlate new information. Eqentia is pioneering new ways to personalize and deploy taxonomies, leveraged by social collaboration. William has more than 27 years of leadership experience in the technology industry as an entrepreneur, business executive, professional speaker, consultant and author. Previously, he held senior positions at Hewlett-Packard, Aberdeen Group and Cognizant.

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Social networking continues to grow and evolve, expanding beyond the early adopters to attract usage in a wide variety of social, business and educational contexts. Community innovations such as the Twitter ‘hash tag’ demonstrate users’ desire to bring structure to their interactions with these networks, and a plethora of mashups make use of APIs to demonstrate the value of this structure. As yet more structure is added, and as the semantic richness grows, do these networks continue to become more powerful or does increased complexity run counter to the ways in which they are actually used?

This panel will explore some of the issues raised when users and third parties invest effort in bringing structure to their social networks, and will ask what the mainstream social networking sites might learn from – or teach – the likes of Twine and BomedExperts.

Attachment: Semantifying Social Networks.mp3 (52.45 MB)

Presenters:

Paul Miller
The Cloud of Data

Stephen Leicht
Collexis Holdings Inc.

Stephen A. Leicht is the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Collexis Holdings Inc, (Ticker Symbol: CLXS). Along with the regional operations leadership, Mr. Leicht manages the Collexis business units, along with their sales and support organizations.

Prior to joining Collexis, Mr. Leicht served in roles of increasing responsibility with IBM Corporation in sales, business development, emerging technology, and general management. Prior to IBM, Mr. Leicht started, ran, and sold International Telecommunications Distributors, Inc and served as Chairman and CEO of the company.

Mr. Leicht has a Masters in Business Administration from Pennsylvania State University’s Smeal College of Business. He received his Bachelors from Bucknell University.

Mr. Leicht is known in Collexis affectionately as the "whiz kid" or "the professor." He serves on boards and advisory committees for several companies and industry groups and is a regular speaker at industry events. He lives with his wife and two children in Columbia, South Carolina.

Amit Sheth
Kno.e.sis Center, Wright State U

Amit Sheth is the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar and director of Knowledge enabled Information and Services Science (Kno.e.sis) Center (http://knoesis.wright.edu) at Wright State University. He is an IEEE fellow. He initiated WSDL-S that led to SAWSDL and co-chaired
W3C SWS XG that discussed SA-REST. He is one of the best cited authors in Computer Science, has chaired 45+ conferences/workshops (including PC Chair of 2008 ISWC), is EIC of
Intl Journal on Semantic Web & Information Systems and co-EIC of Distributed & Parallel Databases, and series co-editor of two Springer Book Series (incl. Semantic Web & Beyond). His contact information is at: http://knoesis.wright.edu/amit.

Please see http://knoesis.wright.edu/amit/publications for a complete list of publications.

Nova Spivack
Radar Networks (Twine.com)

Nova Spivack is one of the leading voices of the emerging Semantic Web, often referred to as Web3.0. Nova founded Radar Networks to develop semantic social software. Radar’s first product, Twine.com, was announced at the Web2.0 summit on October 19th, 2007. In 1994, Nova co-founded EarthWeb (IPO 1998). Nova has worked at Individual, Xerox/Kurzweil, Thinking Machines, and also with SRI International on the DARPA CALO program and nVention. Nova founded Lucid Ventures, and co-founded the San Francisco Web Innovators Network. As a grandson of management guru Peter F. Drucker, Nova shares his grandfather’s interests in the evolution of knowledge work. In 1999 Nova flew to the edge of space in Russia with Space Adventures.

Daniela Barbosa
Synaptica Dow Jones Taxonomy Services

An information junkie fascinated by trends in information delivery and helping companies and users achieve successful information delivery and search strategies including collaboration with social software and other web 2.0 applications, Daniela is part of the Client Solutions group within the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group based in San Francisco. She works with large corporations in deploying information strategies through various parts of the enterprise and has worked with many Fortune 500 clients in the High Tech, Consumer Products, Consulting, Telecommunications, Pharmaceutical and Financial industries as well as many B2C customers. As a co-founder of the DataPortability Project, she has worked on evangelizing data portability principles for users, vendors and developers.

Fraser Kelton
AdaptiveBlue Inc

Fraser has spent his career bringing emerging technologies to market. Currently Fraser is the VP, Business Development at AdaptiveBlue, a leading consumer-facing semantic web company. Previously to joining AdaptiveBlue, Fraser was a member of Trivaris, a seed stage investment firm specializing in the commercialization of new technology. Fraser has spoken at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo, DowJones VentureOne Summit, Add-on-Con and other national technology conferences.

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Semantic Search is often considered to be the holy grail of applying semantics to the web. But there is another set of applications that are gaining prominence – contextual. Several companies are applying semantic technologies to infer user context and then provide enhanced experience on the web.

This discussion will look at how semantics can be applied to gathering and interpreting context. It will look at situational awareness, entity extraction APIs, semantic preview technologies, context-based social technologies and contextual shortcuts.

Attachment: Contextual Awareness.mp3 (23.78 MB)

Presenters:

Alex Iskold
AdaptiveBlue

Alex Iskold is a Founder/CEO of AdaptiveBlue, a company focused on pragmatic semantic technologies. Alex is also a feature writer for one of the top technology blogs – Read/WriteWeb and a member of SemanticGang podcast.

Hundreds of articles on ReadWriteWeb:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/about_alex.php

Jeremy Bentley
Smartlogic

Jeremy Bentley is CEO of Smartlogic and the inventor of Semantic Middleware – whereby ontology-driven navigation and classification software is used to enhance the user experience and classify information to provide Findability.

Findability links people to relevant information via context, and is a vital element in ensuring people have the best user experience when searchong for information.

Smartlogic has concentrated on delivering its Findability system to research intensive organisations, i.e those organisations that best need to harness their information assets. The software is called Semaphore and is employed at leading investment banks; hedge-funds; government organisations; health care providers as well as traditional and new media businesses.

Brian Crook
Cerebra

Brian Crook is a Founder/President of Cerebra, a company focused on improving consumer online content and advertising.

Cerebra "Content Atoms" is a next generation content intelligence and interoperability platform leveraging semantic technologies to increase the relevancy and portability of web content, advertising and products. Cerebra was founded in 2001 around technology acquired from the University of Manchester. In 2008, with initial capital infusion from Intel Capital, Cerebra was spun-out of Software AG as part of a management buy-back to address contextual content and advertising.

Semantic Universe Network is a joint venture of Wilshire Conferences and Semantic Arts and Cerebra

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Semantic Search technology in the Semantic Web community is often understood as retrieval of knowledge from tagged data such as RDF sources, which require substantial formatting and markup to realize. Understanding unstructured query and document text and conducting searches according to their meaning is another approach, exemplified by linguistically rooted semantic matching, ontological knowledge-based semantic interpretation, and statistically based semantic similarity search.

This panel will look at different ways to tackle semantic search as a problem of text understanding. Powerset division of bing’s natural-language processing engine does deep syntactical analysis to determine the meaning of a query or a sentence. Hakia relies on a language-independent ontology model and an ontology-based English lexicon to translate text into a representation of its meaning. RiverGlass has developed an ontological semantic approach to search and text analytics, emphasizing the in-context, linguistic meaning of textual content in order to return truly relevant results in response to information requests. TextWise’s Semantic Signature matching looks for similarities between a query and text at the topic level. Each presenter will introduce their respective semantic search technologies and then lead discussions on how these can benefit

Attachment: Panel – Semantic Search Beyond RDF.mp3 (56.8 MB)

Presenters:

Wen Ruan
TextWise

Wen Ruan is Chief Science Officer at Textwise, LLC. She has a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and Instrumentation and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University (Xi’an, China). She received her Ph.D. in Medical Informatics in 1999 from University of Giessen (Germany). Ruan joined TextWise as the principal researcher on the NIH-funded MEDLINK project, using natural language processing and information extraction techniques to improve search accuracy.

Ruan’s extensive research background in pattern recognition, signal and image processing, standardized medical vocabularies, knowledge representation, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, and statistical analysis has made her a key contributor to the Semantic Signature® technology. She performed a key role in porting the Trainable Semantic Vector technology from its original patent application to the Web for the TextWise online contextual advertising business.

Under Ruan’s direction, the Trainable Semantic Vector patent application space has been extended to search, clustering and classification. She also designed and developed a hybrid search technology offering significant improvements in accuracy and coverage through both semantic and keyword matches. Ruan is currently leading various R&D initiatives to apply Semantic Signature® technology to various vertical business applications.

Riza Berkan
hakia

Founder of hakia, Dr. Berkan is a nuclear scientist by training with a specialization in artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. He is the author of several articles in this area, including the book Fuzzy Systems Design Principles published by IEEE in 1997. Between 1990 and 2000, Dr. Berkan worked as a subcontractor to the US Government and handled multiple Lockheed Martin Energy Systems and Westinghouse projects involving the Y-12 Plant, Savannah River Plant, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Berkan holds a B.S. in Physics from Hacettepe University, Turkey and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Tennessee with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence.

Christian Hempelmann
RiverGlass, Inc.

Ph.D. in Linguistics from Purdue University most recently, Kiki was Chief Scientific Officer for hakia.com, where he led the development of the semantic core technology and the lexical and ontological resources. His research has been in computational linguist with an interest in semantically informed applications including an emphasis on descriptive methods necessary to capture cognitive processing based on knowledge representation. Another field of applications for Kiki is the semantics of humor, a field in which he published numerous articles, reviews, book chapters, and has given invited talks. He is an adjunct assistant professor of linguistics at Purdue University and his previous appointments include an assistant professorship (tenure-track) for linguistics at Georgia Southern University and a postdoctoral researcher position in computational linguistics and cognitive psychology at the University of Memphis. Currently, Kiki is leading the Ontological-Semantic initiative at RiverGlass.

Ronald Kaplan
Powerset division of bing

Ronald M. Kaplan is Chief Scientist of Powerset, a natural language search company recently acquired by Microsoft. Prior to joining Powerset, he was a Research Fellow at the (Xerox) Palo Alto Research Center where he created and directed the Natural Language Theory and Technology research group. He is also a Consulting Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and a Principal of Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information.

He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology in 1975 from Harvard University, where he investigated how explicit computational models of grammar could be embedded in models of human language performance. He has made many contributions to computational linguistics and linguistic theory. These include the notions of consumer-producer and active-chart parsing, the design of the formal theory of Lexical Functional Grammar and its initial computational implementation, and the mathematical, linguistic, and computational concepts that underlie the use of finite-state phonological and morphological descriptions.

He has provided linguistic technologies for commercial applications other than Powerset. He was Chief Scientist of Microlytics, Inc. a PARC spin-off, and delivered software that was incorporated into products sold by Microsoft, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Sony and other companies. He served on the Technical Advisory Board of Inxight Software, another PARC spin-off that commercialized his technology.

Kaplan is a past President of the Association for Computational Linguistics, a co-recipient of the 1992 Software System Award of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a Fellow of the ACM. He has also been a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds over 30 patents in computational linguistics and related areas.

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OWL 2 is the first major revision of OWL, a key semantic technology standard, and is on-track to become a W3C standard in late Spring 2009, just in time for a panel-led community discussion about the opportunities provided by OWL 2.

The panel will be composed of acknowledged OWL 2 experts who’ve helped shape the new revision, including Ivan Herman, Semantic Web lead at W3C; Deborah McGuinness, well-known educator and researcher in ontology-based computing; as well as vendor representatives from Oracle and Clark & Parsia LLC.

The conversation will focus on new features of OWL 2, including the new profiles, as well as usability enhancements that make OWL 2 better suited for a wide-range of real world problems. The panelists will also give insights into the general trends for OWL and OWL 2 adoption among business, government, health care, and related fields. The panel will speak to the rationale behind many design decisions and provide unique insight into the issues surrounding successful adoption of OWL 2. There will be ample opportunity for the audience to shape the discussion during Q&A.

Attachment: Introducing OWL- A Panel and Community Discussion.mp3 (50.78 MB)

Presenters:

Michael Smith
Clark & Parsia LLC

Mike Smith is a Senior Engineer at Clark & Parsia LLC, a software
development and consulting firm specializing in the development and
application of artificial intelligence technologies. Mike is a member
of the W3 OWL WG, participates actively in the OWL community, and
publishes content at http://clarkparsia.com/weblog/ He is one of the
primary developers of Pellet, the open source OWL reasoner, and
contributes to the Protégé and OWL API projects. He holds B.S. and
M.S. degrees in Systems and Information Engineering from the
University of Virginia.

Ivan Herman
World Wide Web Consortium
See http://www.ivan-herman.net

Ian Horrocks
Oxford University

Ian Horrocks is a Fellow of Oriel College Oxford and a Professor in the Oxford University Computing Laboratory. He is internationally recognised for his work on ontology languages and reasoning systems. He was centrally involved in the development of the OIL, DAML+OIL and OWL ontology languages, and is co-chair of the W3C Working Group that is developing OWL 2. He has published more than 150 articles in conferences, journals and books. In 2005 he received the BCS Roger Needham award for his his pioneering work in the Semantic Web and was also awarded an EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship.

Deborah McGuinness
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)

Professor Deborah McGuinness is co-directing the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. For the previous 9 years Dr McGuinness led or co-led the Knowledge Systems Lab at Stanford University. Dr. McGuinness is a leading expert in knowledge representation and reasoning languages and systems, and has worked in ontology creation and evolution environments for over 25 years. She has done foundational work in ontologies, having built and deployed numerous ontological environments during the course of her career in AT&T Bell Laboratories and Lucent Technologies. Her work on languages (including OWL, DAML+OIL, OIL, CLASSIC) is aimed at providing languages that enable the next generation of web applications. She leads efforts at RPI on among other things, explainable systems, accountable social collaborative environments, and semantic eScience. She is on numerous advisory boards for academic and commercial startups and serves as CEO of McGuinness Associates.

Zhe Wu
Oracle

Zhe Wu received his PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001. He received his BE from the Special Class for Gifted Young, University of Science & Technology of China in 1996. He is currently a Consultant Member of Technical Staff working on semantic technologies in New England Development Center, Oracle. As an Oracle representative, he participates the W3C OWL (OWL 2) working group. And he served on UDDI standard specification technical committee from August 2003 to September 2005. His work and research interests are in Semantic Web technologies, logical inferencing, database, web services, nonlinear optimization, computer security, and computer networks

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The adoption of new technology by large enterprises has always been challenging. Recently, SOA and Web service technologies have had some success in making inroads to large enterprises, mainly due to their seemingly direct addressing of business process automation problems, which business executives could readily appreciate. In contrast, the Semantic Web has been nicknamed the "Pedantic Web" due to its frequently esoteric explanations from academics, hindering its adoption.

What is required is the ability to teach business leaders the value of the technology in terms that they can understand. Our panel includes technical leaders that have taken on this challenge and have succeeded in getting these somewhat trailing edge enterprises to embrace the technology. They now wish to share that experience. Topics covered in the panel include:

• What advantages of using Semantic Technologies over existing data integration tools such as ETL and EAI that really resonated with business leaders?
• What objections to the technology has the panel experienced?
• How did the panel address these objections?
• How did members of the panel first introduce the technology?
• How did members of the panel socialize the use of ontologies without it turning into and explanation of the "Pedantic Web"?
• How did the panel address how Semantic Technologies fit in to the SOA strategies for the enterprise?

Note: This podcast is "Premium content", and requires Semantic Universe registration, which is free.

Attachment: Panel – How to Internally Market Semantic Web in Large Enterprises.MP3 (61.18 MB)

Presenters:

Matt Fisher
Progeny Systems

Matt Fisher is a Principal Systems Engineer at Progeny Systems who enjoys discussing the Semantic Web to the point that his wife hopes he gets a new hobby. 

John Gilman
Blue Shield of California

Dir. Architecture and Engineering

David Wood
Zepheira

David Wood is a partner with Zepheira and software engineer/entrepreneur specializing in disruptive technologies. He is a co-founder of the Kowari, Mulgara and PURLZ Open Source Software projects. Dr. Wood has been involved with Semantic Web research and standards efforts since 1999.

Rachel Lovinger
Razorfish

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Note: This podcast is "Premium content", and requires Semantic Universe registration, which is free.

Attachment: Final Panel – Bringing SemTech Back to the Business.mp3 (49.7 MB)

Presenters:

Dave McComb
Semantic Arts
Dave is President of Semantic Arts, and author of “Semantics in Business Systems.” He has 30 years of experience applying leading edge technologies to enterprise level applications.

John Gilman
Blue Shield of California

Dir. Architecture and Engineering

Christine Connors

Christine joined Intuit in July 2006 as Knowledge Architect. Her goals are to design and deliver a set of systematic processes that allow the right information to be delivered at the moment of truth, thereby creating environments in which knowledge gathering is a positive experience.

Stephen Hall
Vulcan Capital

Managing Director

Jeffrey T. Pollock

James Hendler
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Assistant Dean for IT. Jim is former Director of the Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery and co-director of the Maryland Information and Network Dynamics (MIND) Laboratory at the University of Maryland, and is widely recognized as one of the earliest visionaries of the Semantic Web.

Ivan Herman
World Wide Web Consortium
See http://www.ivan-herman.net

Jonathan Mack
Guardian Life

Senior Technical Architect

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This session is particularly appropriate for CTOs developing new products and services based on semantic technologies, as well as entrepreneurs trying to understand where the money folks see the best business opportunities.

Attachment: Semantic Venture Panel: Investor Opportunities and Pitfalls (25.14 MB)

Presenters:

Stephen Hall
Vulcan Capital

Managing Director

Amanda Reed
Palomar Ventures

Partner

Eghosa Omoigui
Intel Capital
Investment Director

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• The core specifications have stabilized

• Tools and frameworks implementing key features have been through several development cycles

• An increasing number of major software companies have developed semantically enabled products or are actively researching the space

As companies start to translate theory into real applications, they are confronted with a host of practical software engineering issues:

• What is the standard or recommended functional architecture of a semantic application?

• How does that architecture relate to the Semantic Web standards?

• Which of those standards are stable and which can be expected to evolve in ways that would significantly impact prior applications?

• What types of tools/frameworks exist that can be leveraged to help implement semantic applications?

• How mature are the various categories of Semantic Web tools/frameworks?

• Can API standardization be expected for certain tool/framework categories?

• What best practices exist for the design, implementation and deployment of semantic applications?

• What future trends in support for semantic application development can be expected?

This panel session gathers together semantics experts from the software industry to address these and other practical issues relating to the development of semantic applications.

Attachment: Panel – Developing Semantic Web Applications (24.68 MB)

Presenters:

Henry Story
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Staff Engineer

Dean Allemang
TopQuadrant
Dr. Allemang specializes in innovative applications of knowledge technology and brings to TopQuadrant over 15 years of experience in research, deployment, and development of knowledge-based systems. He developed the curriculum for Top Quadrant’s successful training series for Semantic Web technologies, which he has been presenting to customers world-wide for four years. Dean has completed a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall scholar, a PhD at the Ohio State University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Scholar, and is a two-time winner of the Swiss Prize for Innovation in Technology. Prior to joining TopQuadrant, Dr. Allemang was the Vice-President of Customer Applications at Synquiry Technologies, were he filed two patents on the application of graph matching algorithms to the problems of semantic information interchange.

Dr. Jans Aasman
President & CEO, Franz Inc.

Dr. Jans Aasman, Franz’s President and CEO, was a longtime customer and joined Franz from TNO Telecom based in The Netherlands. Prior to Franz, he worked at KPN Research, the research lab of a major Dutch telecommunication company. Dr. Aasman was a tenured professor in Industrial Design at the Technical University of Delft, where he held the chair title Informational Ergonomics of Telematics and Intelligent Products. He also was a visiting scientist at the Computer Science Department of Prof. Dr. Alan Newell at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Aasman holds a degree in experimental and cognitive psychology from the University of Groningen, with specialization in Psychophysiology and Cognitive Psychology.

Eric Miller
Zepheira, LLC

Eric Miller is the President of Zepheira. Prior to founding Zepheira, Eric led the Semantic Web Initiative for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT where he led the architectural and technical leadership in the design and evolution of the Semantic Web. Eric is a frequent and sought after international speaker in the areas of International Web standards, knowledge management, collaboration, development, and deployment.

Jeroen Wester
Aduna

CTO

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