Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Spreadsheets, meet the Semantic Web.

In May, Semanticweb.com reported on a challenge issued by Brand Niemann of the Environmental Protection Agency about “semantifying” the wealth of government data locked away in spreadsheets. That’s a challenge that has resonance to Brian Donnelly, founder and CEO of In Silico Discovery, which has developed the Semantic Discovery System (SDS).

Niemann, a pioneer in the field of enterprise architecture integration as the founder of Constellar Corp. (which was acquired by IBM), says his vision is being “the first company to bring the semantic web to the desktop.” The desktop is where Excel reigns, and also where businesses come face to face with the problem of trying to integrate large volumes of data that exist in separate worksheets to be able to do sophisticated querying around that information.

The Semantic Discovery System, which has been in beta, is set to become generally available as a download next quarter. It has its heritage in the work Donnelly has done with large life sciences organizations, in the area of drug discovery.

“There’s a theme that says spreadsheets are not going away,” says Donnelly. “So we need to control them. In the drug discovery world, everyone uses spreadsheets, and they discover really valuable things with them. But you end up cutting and pasting all over the place, and you need a better way of linking them together, to query between the spreadsheets.”

And, the company believes, you need a way to create those queries and present the results, using a powerful engine that utilizes semantic web standards (OWL, SPARQL, RDF) under the hood, in an easy-to-digest graphical interface. “You don’t have to write joins or other things; you can ask questions of your data without any programming. Just let SPARQL do the work in the background,” Niemann says.

What goes for the drug discovery world is equally applicable to getting, say, a consolidated view of sales by region from multiple spreadsheets. Some purists might find this focus on spreadsheet integration a rather ridiculous use of the semantic web, Donnelly says, but that’s underestimating a real business problem and the potential the semantic web has to solve it.

So much of the focus of the semantic web has been on “very arcane complicated triple stores and OWL reasoners and things you have to be a PhD to understand, far less use,” he says. “There are some very good products that do specialty things, but they seem to be very good for tradesmen, the people who build solutions rather than work with them.”

One of In Silico’s advisory board members, Dr. Tonya Hongsermeier, corporate manager for clinical knowledge management at Partners Health Care, has expressed frustration with that academic focus, Niemann says, noting to him that Partners is a business and needs a grown-up, enterprise-level product.

“Someone needs to get this semantic marketplace, take hold of it and turn it into a business-focused thing that solves problems,” he says. “Awhile ago I started looking on the web just to get a plain English idea of what to use the semantic web for right now, and I couldn’t find a single answer. What we believe is with SDS, you can solve a business problem immediately, which is how to query over multiple, distributed data. The semantics of the thing let you do that. So we think the semantic desktop and SDS just gets the point across.”

In Silico plans to offer the downloadable desktop version for $499.

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