Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

InQuira recently updated its Customer Experience Platform to Version 8.1, but the knowledge management company says users shouldn’t assume that the nomenclature means this is your typical point release.

The latest version adds a Multilingual Dictionary whose “secret sauce” lies in its natural language processing technology’s improved ability to understand the intent of a user visiting a company’s website across 13 different languages, and get them to where they need to be to fulfill their requests as quickly as possible.

“At the end of the day Version 8.1 is a pretty significant enhancement to our product,” says head of products Peter Tebenhoff.

As an example, he posits an anti-virus vendor that sells its software in multiple markets and runs the new version to support customer interactions on its web site; the site has to meet customers’ needs to download the latest protection against a virulent new virus, whether they make that request in English, French, Portuguese, Russian or InQuira’s other supported languages.

The new version now eliminates the need for the anti-virus vendor to maintain multiple instances of the InQuira application and separate dictionaries for each language they use to support their customer base on the Internet.

“Today with the multilingual dictionary line of product, customers can consolidate that into a single dictionary, so there’s one location, the potential for central maintenance, and many people can access the dictionary from different locations and configure it appropriately,” he says. In addition to enabling easier maintenance, the upgrade should also deliver better performance to end users, Tebenhoff says.

The new version also makes it easier for InQuira customers who want to offer help to their users who speak a language they don’t direct support on their web sites. For example, say the anti-virus vendor didn’t have a version of its web site in Spanish. But since InQuira does support that language, it will still understand the request by the Spanish-speaking customer, and can offer that person a choice of downloading the update he wants in another language that he also may speak. Because the concept behind the request now is the same across multiple languages, there are now multiple paths through its natural language processing to get to a desired end result.

“So even if it’s a search word where the customer has not put together a localized version of its web site, as long as we can detect the concept, we can present information in different languages and direct the customer to it,” Tebenhoff says.

The work behind this, he says, in many ways revolved around enhancing InQuira’s dictionary manager so that it can handle multiple ontologies in multiple languages simultaneously.

“We enabled cross-lingual search and the real value is that a single natural language search can occur across multiple languages and return accurate results in the language they want or all available languages,” he says.

VP of marketing Chris Hall says the latest version makes the software even more attractive to multinational firms, whose operations in foreign countries may be treated as subsidiaries selling different products and services in those locales.

“They need the freedom to give those subsidiary divisions full access to workbenches in their native language to create their own content – they need the multilingual capability to keep them self sufficient,” he says.

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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published its report from its December workshop on the semantic web’s role in the oil and gas industry. Expectations are that the semantic web has enormous potential in this sector, given the huge amount of data it produces on a daily basis thanks to its work in drilling, exploration and production, reservoir management, major capital projects, and facility and upstream and downstream operations.

In fact, according to a presentation at the workshop given by Jim Crompton, Chevron manager of technology and architecture, “Growth in data volume is increasing, especially with field automation on new major capital projects and with digital oil field programs.”

Chevron, he notes in the presentation slides, has more than 6,000 terabytes of data, and counting. It’s seen an 80 percent annual growth rate of technical data in 2007, and a 60 percent compound annual growth rate of business (unstructured) data for the last two years.

“This means we will have 10x the data in 5 years, 100x in 10 years and 1000x in 15 years,” according to the presentation slides.

Yet enterprise-wide information management successes have been few, with consequences on a number of fronts. A few cited in the presentation slide deck are that a significant amount of time (30 percent to 70 percent) is spent looking for and assessing the quality of the data found; that it is hard to trust the data found because of issues around a lack of consistent data definitions, for one thing; and that this has an impact on the ability to share data with other team members, offsite experts, partners, and regulators and landlords.

“Our successes in IM have mostly been in restricted domains, often involving descriptions and organizations peculiar to those domains, and the isolation of these domain-specific efforts has been worrisome,” the presentation notes.

Semantic web standards and tools can have a role in increasing the value of information by improving data quality, making data more available for decision-making, enhancing data integration and interoperability, and enabling effective operation of data management systems. The presentation notes that there has been some success with XML-based data protocols to exchange data, and underscores the potential that an understanding of data relationships between functional taxonomies can unlock integration opportunities.

An organizing mechanism

Those ideas contribute to the high-level goal of this workshop, which, according to the W3C, was to gather and share possible use cases and/or case studies for semantic web in the industry. Talks also focused on the general methodology for creating and managing ontologies used in semantic web applications, according to the W3C, with three general types of potentially useful ontologies coming to the fore.

The W3C lists them as: upper ontologies that express concepts not specific to the industry (such as location information); domain ontologies that express concepts specific to, or heavily used, in the industry (such as geology, reservoir characteristics, and production volumes); and application ontologies that express information used in a particular project or experts’ experience in industry activities (such as information about geological interpretations or reservoir simulations).

According to a paper from academics at the University of Texas, Austin, Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) has become an increasingly important aspect of hydrocarbon production, given the volatility of oil prices and the fact that 65 percent of oil still remains in place after secondary recovery. An ontology-driven EOR decision support system can be critical in selecting and executing a plan for EOR for a particular reservoir, the paper argues.

“Ontology provides an organizing mechanism such that knowledge is managed to be accessible to software agents as well as humans. It also helps bridge the gap among disciplines and maximizes reusability. In addition, it provides the basis for automatic inferences,” the authors write. “The idea is to capture all the workflows dealing with different aspects of EOR, create workflow-driven ontologies, and combine them together into a comprehensive decision-support system” that will be able to address questions ranging from what EOR Methods should be considered for a reservoir, to how much uncertainty is associated with the prediction of performance in the field, to calculating the value of doing more lab work before going into production with an EOR method.

The authors note they are using the Stanford-developed and -maintained Protégé-OWL to build all ontologies — including to date a pilot EOR screening ontology, a simplified recovery calculation ontology, and a risk management ontology — as it provides a very flexible environment for ontology development with many plug-ins and APIs for extensibility.

Date: June 12, 2008, 12:00AM (all day)
Register: View the archived webcast

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.

Date: October 16, 2008, 12:00AM (all day)
Register: View the archived webcast

What is the Semantic Web and how does it relate to Web 3.0? What is Linked Data? What about enterprise applications? Who is using Semantic Web technologies, for what purposes and why? In this first installment of our Free Webcast series, Jim Hendler and Dean Allemang, leaders in the field of Semantic Technologies and co-authors of the recent book “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist”, take us on our first steps into the world of the Semantic Web.

Presenters:

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.

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.

Date: November 5, 2008, 12:00AM (all day)
Register: View the archived webcast

In the second installment of our Free Webcast series, Jim Hendler and Dean Allemang, leaders in the field of Semantic Technologies and co-authors of the recent book “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist”, will walk us through the basic language components of the Semantic Web.

Presenters:

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.

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.

Date: January 22, 2009, 10:00AM (1 hour)
Register: View the archived webcast

In the fourth and fifth installments of our Free Webcast series, Lee Feigenbaum, VP of Technology and Standards at Cambridge Semantics, introduces us to the SPARQL query language by showing real-life examples with existant semantic data.

Presenters:

Lee Feigenbaum
Cambridge Semantics

Lee Feigenbaum has been using Semantic Web technologies to architect and develop enterprise middleware and applications since 2003. He brings this expertise to his role as Cambridge Semantics’s VP of Technology and Standards, where he is responsible for the design and development of the Anzo family of semantic applications and middleware. Lee is the author of Glitter, a pluggable SPARQL engine designed to query multiple data sources. Lee served as Chair of the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group, publishing the SPARQL query language and protocol specifications. Lee co-authored "The Semantic Web in Action," a December 2007 article in Scientific American. Before joining Cambridge Semantics, Lee spent five years as an engineer with IBM’s Advanced Internet Technology Group. There, his experiences spanned knowledge management and annotation systems, instant-messaging software, and Web-based client application runtimes. Lee writes about Semantic Web technologies at his blog, TechnicaLee Speaking.

Date: December 16, 2008, 12:00AM (all day)
Register: View the archived webcast
Q&A: SPARQL by Example – Part I • Q & A with Lee Feigenbaum

Lee Feigenbaum, VP of Technology and Standards at Cambridge Semantics, introduces us to the SPARQL query language by showing real-life examples with existant semantic data.

Presenters:

Lee Feigenbaum
Cambridge Semantics

Lee Feigenbaum has been using Semantic Web technologies to architect and develop enterprise middleware and applications since 2003. He brings this expertise to his role as Cambridge Semantics’s VP of Technology and Standards, where he is responsible for the design and development of the Anzo family of semantic applications and middleware. Lee is the author of Glitter, a pluggable SPARQL engine designed to query multiple data sources. Lee served as Chair of the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group, publishing the SPARQL query language and protocol specifications. Lee co-authored "The Semantic Web in Action," a December 2007 article in Scientific American. Before joining Cambridge Semantics, Lee spent five years as an engineer with IBM’s Advanced Internet Technology Group. There, his experiences spanned knowledge management and annotation systems, instant-messaging software, and Web-based client application runtimes. Lee writes about Semantic Web technologies at his blog, TechnicaLee Speaking.

Date: November 25, 2008, 12:00AM (all day)
Register: View the archived webcast

In this third installment of our Free Webcast series, Jim Hendler and Dean Allemang, leaders in the field of Semantic Technologies and co-authors of the recent book “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist”, round out the discussion by examining how the Semantic Web is being used today.

Presenters:

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.

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.

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Got questions? Expert System has the answers.

Well, at least that is the goal of the vendor’s latest incarnation of its semantic search engine, Cogito Answers. The technology is aimed at being a true semantic solution to addressing the challenges facing users — both employees involved in enterprise search processes and customers trying to help themselves — face in extracting the unstructured information they need via email, the web, and mobile devices.

“We apply the semantic engine to corporate information directly, so the system normalizes, integrates, and semantically extracts information from unstructured, where statistics say the vast majority of content or data resides,” says VP of Internet and Mobile Walter Kostiuk. “The second part is the natural language interface which is definitely a breakthrough in how you extract information easily — it reduces the technology barrier of heavy applications and lets users interact with machines as they do with people. The same way you can e-mail a colleague you now can go through the web or wireless interface to communicate with a knowledge base.”

It’s a tool with applicability to Fortune 500 companies in general, and to telcos in particular. Carriers have a problem in that the new age of smart phones has some downsides to all the revenue pluses it delivers in terms of increased data usage — that is, their complexity breeds customer service calls. Lots of them. The biggest cost of selling these phones for carriers, says Kostiuk, comes in terms of dealing with customer service issues, to the tune of about $6 to $10 per call processed.

Half of those calls are just about how to use the product or service, according to research Expert has done with carriers and a smart phone maker — and that information is already provided in a user manual and already present in companies’ knowledge bases.

“So if a system existed where someone through common language could ask their questions through the web or a wireless interface, it would deflect that cost. The ROI is clear,” says Kostiuk. In a beta test Expert is currently conducting with a large smart phone device maker, Cogito Answers is handling tens of thousands of questions a day, he says.

Read more

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Florida is once again a notch in Metatomix’ belt. The semantic web vendor’s platform powers its Judicial Inquiry System (JIS), and now the Sunshine State’s Lee County has extended the technology behind that system in its implementation of the platform for its Active Warrant Alert System.
The Active Warrant system identifies defendants appearing before the court who have open local, Florida, out-of-state or federal warrants.

In that capacity, the technology serves as the platform providing much-needed help for a county that didn’t have enough manpower to consistently and holistically check warrant information from sheriff’s departments and attorney’s offices across local, state and national information systems at every stage of the process, from first appearance through arraignments, docket appearances, and any other time a defendant shows up in court. Previously, with staffing being what it was, it wasn’t always possible for bailiffs to conduct full background checks for other warrants across more than a dozen databases, in multiple formats, at every turn beyond the first appearance, because the process was too-labor intensive, says Sheila Mann, court operations manager for communications.

That was a problem, because if the defendant had been suspected of engaging in other criminal activity between first appearance and his formal charging at arraignment, or even at a docket sounding to check that everything is ready for trial, the fact that he was wanted on another charge might not be uncovered.

“If they walked into court, and we don’t know they had another warrant out on them, they might walk right back out,” says Mann. “If we knew a warrant was out we could arrest them at their arraignment or court dates.”

The Metatomix Semantic Platform that underlies the Active Warrant Alert System, developed by Metatomix in conjunction with the Florida Office of State Courts Administrator, connects data from multiple sources in real-time and presents active warrant information to the court’s calendar system and the Comprehensive Case Information System.

Lee County began testing the technology in October, going live in November with the implementation that cost around $150,000 as part of a joint effort with the Lee County Sheriff’s Department. Within the first eight days of going live, the Metatomix system ran through some 3,000 names and identified 141 warrants, Mann says. Metatomix notes that that led to 16 arrests. “Now we can see we are hitting things outside of our local area that weren’t picked up before – we just didn’t have manpower,” says Mann.

This is the first county in Florida to integrate the Active Warrant Alert System, but Mann notes that the Collier County’s sheriff’s department has signed on to use the technology as well.

“It goes through all of the databases, and highlights various information,” she says. “You can search through a limited part of databases or drill deeper.” What does she think about the semantic technology that makes all this possible? Mann cares only that it works, and works well. “I heard all the semantic stuff and I get that it is something really cool, but I’m just glad that we get these hits.”