From Infrastructure to Application

By SemanticWeb.com on February 22, 2008 1:02 PM

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Thetus Corp., the developer of Thetus Publisher, a knowledge modeling tool that uses semantic technologies as a foundation to do complex system modeling, has plans to move up the stack, so to speak. This quarter it will be bringing to market a resource modeling application aimed at the energy sector.

“Historically, Thetus has been in the business of providing infrastructure software,” says Philip Pridmore-Brown, vice president of marketing and product services, in which customers generally employ system integrators to help them codify ontologies and formulate conceptual knowledge models for a particular domain, and then expose information to end users via portal environments. With the upcoming offering, Thetus will be building in the ontology models, the workflow components, and user interfaces, so that people have an out-of-the-box working application.

The resource modeling application is designed for examining models in a large context — the interaction of, say, a physical infrastructure with legislation, social trends, and softer goals.

“The users using this system are looking at it in terms of, if I make a change in a particular area, what might that affect, how are different goals related to one another?” Pridmore-Brown explains. For example, one goal may be to reduce the impact of trees on power lines by cutting down a specific number of trees per year, while an equally critical goal may be to reduce storm water runoff by 25% in the next year — and trees are critical to mitigating storm water runoff.

“So we model a system where people can describe these goals, understand how they hang together, and interact with them as a cohesive model vs. a siloed set of objects and data,” Pridmore-Brown says.

Why target the upcoming application at the energy sector, which hasn’t been a prime market for semantic technology?

“They’re dealing with very high value data and complex environments. And they have a lot on the line,” says Pridmore-Brown. “If you look at some of the different metrics for energy, getting the most value out of their data and being able to capture user knowledge is one of the key things, and semantic technology is a perfect fit for that. Whoever can get the most value out of their data, and really understand the system, is going to have a competitive advantage.”

Thetus Publisher, which provides a platform for people to capture what they know about complex systems and evolve them as they learn more about their domains, has a presence in the government sector. This month, for example, Thetus announced that release 2.6 of the software would be integrated into ManTech MBI’s (MMBI) government-funded project to develop a web-based force protection assessment system.

Because of the nature of the project, Thetus is limited in the details it can disclose. But force protection basically means providing military personnel with a complete picture of what’s going on around them, and what potential threats might lurk when they go to an area. “You need to be able to abstract what the information is in that data and model it in a way that a user can interact with higher-level concepts, models that represent risks and opportunities, and interact at that abstracted level vs. being tied to a specific data set,” says Pridmore-Brown.

But as its work on the new resource modeling application indicates, Thetus is looking out to making its abstraction and modeling vision something that the average enterprise user can easily interact with.

“We’re looking at what the user experience is, how you can communicate those benefits to the users, and how to make this type of modeling approach as mainstream as some of the business intelligence applications are today,” says Pridmore-Brown. “We’d like to see a lot of movement in terms of letting people really understand the impact of their actions over time, and how their goals can be realized.”

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