Image Courtesy: Flickr/Patrick Hoesly

The financial services industry is taking to semantic tech in an important way, and that’s in the form of the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), which aims to standardize the language used to precisely define the terms, conditions, and characteristics of financial instruments; the legal and relationship structure of business entities; the content and time dimensions of market data; and the legal obligations and process aspects of corporate actions. Attendees at SemTech Biz in San Francisco will get a deep dive on the how’s and why’s, at this session, while the FIBO Technology Summit invitation event will present an opportunity for working collaboratively to continue advancing the effort that has its roots in The Enterprise Data Management Council and communities of interests.

Leading that event will be Dennis E. Wisnosky, founder of Wizdom Systems, Inc. and former CTO and Chief Architect of the DoD Business Mission Area, who was recently named to provide technical strategy and operational guidance to help the Council finalize and implement FIBO standards, and David S. Newman, SVP & Strategic Planning Manager Enterprise Architecture at Wells Fargo, and Chair of the EDM Council’s Semantics Program. (Newman, with Enterprise Data Management Council Head of Semantics and Standards Mike Bennett, will also host the SemTech FIBO session.)  Speaking of the upcoming event, Wisnosky explains that a goal is to cast a wide net to find the new tech ideas and developments that both can bring benefits to FIBO in the short term and influence the longer-term research agenda to help the financial industry.

As FIBO stands now, in June the second draft of the FIBO Foundations ontology and the conceptual FIBO Business Entities ontology will be presented at a meeting of the Object Management Group in Berlin. By year’s end it is expected that the OMG will have ratified these as formal standards. “We are on the path to turn the corner from thinking of what FIBO will be to delivering it,” says Wisnosky. Read more

Northrop Grumman is looking for a Data Engineer in Newport News, VA. The post states, “The Air and Space Operations Center (AOC) Weapon System (WS) is the Joint Forces Air Component Commander’s (JFACC) primary Command and Control (C2) node to develop the air and space operations strategies and plans to meet the Combat Commander’s objectives… This versatile integration engineer will support the process of operational thread composition using tools from the new AOC-WS 10.2 infrastructure. They will use strong development skills to build mediations, business process flows, business rules, event scripts, and other glue code. They will design and compose operational mission threads using infrastructure subsystems, and AOC mission application interfaces & SOA services. This combination of development, integration, and operational focus makes these positions similar to the emerging DevOps discipline.” Read more

3M has opened up the 3M Healthcare Data Dictionary under an agreement with the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. According to the article, “The 3M Healthcare Data Dictionary will provide the core technology to enable semantic interoperability for the joint DoD/VA integrated Electronic Health Record (iEHR), making it possible to share medical knowledge and secure patient data between care providers at U.S. military treatment facilities located around the world and VA Medical Centers. Access to actionable clinical information whenever and wherever care is delivered will enable safer, better coordinated, and higher quality care for the country’s 32 million veterans, active service members, and their families.” Read more

NOTE: This post is provided by guest author, Mr. Dennis E. Wisnosky, Chief Technical Officer and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense. Dennis will be delivering a Special Presentation, “The Enterprise Information Web: Analytics, Efficiency and Security” at the June SemTechBiz Conference.

Semantic Technology brings a number of unique capabilities to data stores and applications.  These capabilities evidence themselves both at the user interaction level, in what users can do with and expect from Semantic technologies; and at the system level, in terms of things applications can do internally without rework or recoding.  Semantic Technology, based upon W3C standards, provides capabilities significantly beyond those of proprietary approaches based on technologies that were founded a half century earlier.

1. User Interaction Capabilities

Access to Meaning

Semantic Technology is based upon the development of the ontology of a particular domain.   That is, “what do I need to know to have an unambiguous understanding of a particular thing, organization, subject, etc.?”  This knowing is based upon precise understanding of the meaning of words used in the domain.  A Semantic-Technology-based application depends on and provides a user with access to the defined meaning of the terms—the vocabulary, the words—used in the application.  This means access to a human-only readable definition, such as one found in a dictionary, and access to the formalized definition found in the ontology that frames the system which executes the application.  Such access should be presented in a human consumable form, and is one of the areas in which various formalisms such as Controlled Natural Language (CNL) are useful for translating technical forms of ontologies, such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL) , a W3C standard, to provide a human consumable form.

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I’m very happy to announce that the World Wide Web Consortium’s RDB2RDF Working Group, in which I participate as an Invited Expert,  has published two Candidate Recommendations: R2RML: RDB to RDF Mapping Language and A Direct Mapping of Relational Data to RDF. This has been a long road and we still have some ways to go. The standardization process goes back to the W3C Workshop on RDF Access to Relational Databases, which took place in October 2007. The W3C RDB2RDF Incubator Group followed afterwards. After almost 5 years, we are on track to have a standard. However, what is this standard bringing to the table?

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To accompany our recent podcast looking back on 2011, we’ve accumulated some additional perspectives from thought leaders in the next-wave Web space on the year that’s quickly passing us by.

Some highlights follow. You’ll see respondents hit on some common themes throughout, such as Big Data, sentiment analytics, specific vertical industry adoption, and the standards space:

• SKOS has become an increasingly popular entry point for organizations that want to use semantic technology in practical applications without worrying about the more complicated aspects of semantic web technology. – Bob  DuCharme, solutions architect, TopQuadrant

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A recent article reports that “In its ongoing quest to catalyze cost efficiencies and improve information-sharing, the Defense Department is increasingly looking to IT to solve problems of all sizes. The latest bid involves high-tech search capabilities, interoperable data and a futuristic, data-rich internet known as semantic web.”

It continues, “In a new RFI, the Defense Information Systems Agency and Deputy Chief Management Office are looking to strengthen interoperability and data-sharing for a vast array of requirements through an enterprise information web (EIW). Read more

The US Department of Defense has funded a project called the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) that will “make real data on conflicts and insurgencies available for academic study by scholars from the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University as well as from Princeton. According to a Fast Company article by Neal Ungerleider, by making this level of conflict data available the Department of Defense can essentially ‘crowdsource’ research and analysis. Furthermore, the study may one day make vetted data from the project available to the public, opening up even larger opportunities.” Read more

A new article reports, “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DoD progenitors of revolutionary tech like passive radar and the Internet, is calling for research applications of social media to strategic communication. According to an agency announcement (PDF), DARPA is looking to shell out $42 million in funding for ‘innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems.’ The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base.” This push toward the innovative social technology is hardly new territory for DARPA – the agency has been at the forefront of the semantic web for years with initiatives like DAML, the US flagship R&D program in semantic web. Read more

I hate to even mention how quickly Summer is passing, but as we head into August, it’s time to start making plans for the busy Fall event season. September is particularly full of Semantic Tech events.

September 14, in New York City, the Semantic Web Media Summit will take place. A half-day meeting focused on uses of Semantic Web in media, advertising, and publishing, the event is produced by SemanticWeb.com, Lotico.com and our parent company, MediaBistro. With a keynote by Mike Dunn, CTO of Hearst Interactive, and contributions from a stellar group of presenters, the program promises to be a must-attend event for anyone in the New York area interested in how Semantic Technology is changing the media world.  OpenAmplify is sponsoring the conference.

September 21-23, DC-2011, the eleventh International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, will take place at the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague.

Also on Sept. 21, the folks at Schema.org are planning a workshop in Silicon Valley. There are still few details available about this event.

September 26-27, The London Semantic Technology and Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) takes place at the Hotel Russell. This two-day executive conference is designed for business and technology executives who need to learn what semantic technologies are and how to take advantage of semantics in their enterprise and web-based systems. Attendees will further their technical understanding in introductory sessions and learn from the Keynote speakers John O’Donovan (Press Association), Martin Hepp (Hepp Research), Steve Harris (Garlik), and Dennis E. Wisnosky, U.S. Department of Defense.