Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The government has been one of the early sectors to adopt semantic web technologies. As you may know, the federal government had a good deal to do with the semantic web’s development in the first place, with the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML), designed by the Defense Research Projects Agency as an extension to XML and RDF.

In addition to the feds, state and local governments aren’t passing the semantic web by, either. Colin Britton, co-founder and CTO of Metatomix, says the company was founded on the idea of having a set of capabilities around a metadata-driven approach to managing information that would have value for dealing with problems related to business integration. Along the way, Metatomix discovered that state and local governments were excellent prospects, because unlike commercial enterprises they can’t always avail themselves of technologies such as data warehouses to solve some data integration problems. Political, privacy, and legal issues are an impediment.

“I would feel uncomfortable if the state of Massachusetts brought together everything they could find about me and put it in one database,” says Britton.

But as soon as someone is accused of doing something wrong, the game changes. This propels the need for what are termed “integrated justice” systems, where data about an individual existing within multiple sources of information can be quickly pulled together for a specific judicial purpose, and an audit trail can be maintained of which sources data was drawn from and in what context.

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“If I did something wrong the judge should know all about me to make an appropriate decision,” Britton says.

Traditionally, the judge relied on that information being gathered on a per case basis by humans, swivel-chairing between multiple systems to pull a report together on an individual. That system has its flaws: Depending on the researcher’s case load, a judge might not get as much granular information on a particular individual, for example. Plus, the job itself is time-consuming, and takes staff resources away from other work they might be doing.

What was wanted — and what semantic technologies can provide — is a way to have a fuller view of an individual by looking at more data sources, in near real time. The state of Florida became the first in the nation to deploy the Judicial Inquiry System based on Metatomix’ semantic technology for integration. The state says this streamlines information from a variety of Florida agencies into a single, central dashboard accessible by judges and other related personnel, while also allowing those agencies to retain control over their individual database content.

Currently, more than 4,000 individuals at agencies in Florida use the technology, Metatomix says, and data also can be pulled into the system from other states, county, and federal agencies, because its solution supports standards for data exchange in the judicial world, such as NIEM (National Information Exchange Model). Metatomix cites success metrics such as reducing the processing time for building a first appearance docket from 45 minutes down to 3.

“But the anecdotal facts — less-hard ROI — are more compelling,” says Britton. Those are the ones in which judges have been able to have a bevy of information at their fingertips to determine the veracity of an individual. “They can go and check vs. taking something on face value when making assessments about bail or child custody or all sorts of things judges must make decisions on,” he says. “More accurate information equals more informed decisions, which reduces the risk of people being put in harm’s way.”

This month, the company released Version 5.0 of its semantic middleware platform. The company says the new version features service oriented architecture (SOA)-enabling technology, new semantic services functionality (including full support of the W3C standard for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language), administrative and performance enhancements, and standards support, to help customers leverage semantic technology to integrate data, uncover and define information relationships, and provide business applications with meaning and actionable insight. The company also announced that it will enable its semantic middleware platform on the recently announced Oracle Database 11g.

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