Last week the Semantic Web Jobs Report looked at the overall trends in semantic web jobs. Somebody commented that it would be good to see more about jobs related to Ontology.

Read on for our findings….

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Over the past twenty years, a number of standards groups have arisen to develop, manage or reconcile Healthcare data or IT-related standards. Much of the focus over the past decade has been dedicated specifically to data exchange standards and identifying standard data elements for various sub-domains of Healthcare practice automation. The primary standards bodies involved in these activities include but are not limited to the following organizations:

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Of all the areas where Semantic Technology may help to transform current practices, no one area may be impacted more than Science.

I’ll distinguish empirical science from the myriad of other sciences by stating that it is characterized more by processes designed to facilitate discovery – the scientific method. The goal of empirical science is to solve problems, it does so through answering a series of questions, often through use of experimentation. Of the IT domains I’ve discussed previously the one that is most involved in pure science is Healthcare, so let’s take a look at that for moment.

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Integration is more than the coding of application or data interfaces. When dealing with complex integration within or across enterprises, there must be sufficient discipline to achieve reproducible results. Furthermore, that discipline must be tailored to the unique requirements of the domain/s in question. Few domains are as complex as Healthcare. Even more important perhaps is that integration cannot be viewed outside of the context of the outcomes within the domains they are meant to serve. Technical success may not translate to process or performance improvement if the relationships between domain goals and enabling technologies aren’t properly understood. Some of the basic concepts associated with our IH include the following:

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This is the second of a two-part series discussing how Semantic Web Technology can enable Dynamic Business Applications in the enterprise. Read Part 1 of the article here.

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Does your organization find that it can develop a new product faster than your IT group can create a new application to manage it?  Are your existing systems too inflexible?

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Active Linked Data Community, eGovernment, and Industry Showing Support for Growing W3C Standards Stack

http://www.w3.org/ — 15 June 2009 — W3C technical staff and more than 30 W3C Member organizations will present at the Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech) this week in San Jose, California. Sessions led by W3C staff and Member organizations highlight the accelerating rate of adoption and deployment of Semantic Web technologies in the past year. In particular, the talks underscore an active Linked Data community in government, healthcare, finance and other industries dedicated to the adoption of Semantic Web technologies based on W3C standards.

"We have gathered a growing number of Semantic Web use cases and case studies in the past 12 months," said Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Activity Lead for W3C. "What thrills me is the diversity of application areas for the Semantic Web, including more software, services and tools, as well as successful deployment in business and industry."

W3C collects and publishes Semantic Web use cases and case studies as part of its community building and outreach programs.

SemTech attendees are invited to visit the W3C booth (number 120) during the conference.

Community Needs Drives Advances in Standards for Web of Data

W3C presenters will discuss advances in semantic tools to help people build, organize, and manage their data. The maturing standards provide tools for:

• knowledge representation on the Web. Data on the Web is expressed using terms such as "author" or "flight number" or "account number." When people wish to assign meaning to those terms and to express relationships among them ("’auteur’ means the same thing as ‘author’, in French"), they can used the Web Ontology Language (OWL).
• knowledge organization systems such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems and taxonomies. The new Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) specification has already been used by librarians and others to create more than 20 thesauri, including the United States Library of Congress Authorities and Vocabularies and the Leibnitz Information Centre for Economics of the German National Library of Economics.
• content descriptions that will make it easier to provide, customize, and trust information added to large number of resources on the Web (see use cases). The Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) addresses the issue of publishing trustworthy metadata easily for a large number of Web resources. The POWDER Primer lists a number of benefits to various audiences, including these: end users will have an easier time judging the trustworthiness of information, publishers will be able to add more semantics to existing information, and service providers will be able to offer real-time content personalization.
• rule systems to address use cases in a variety of disciplines, including: the ability to negotiate eBusiness contracts across rule platforms, managing business policies and practices across organizational boundaries, rule support for medical decisions. The primary goal of the Rules Interchange Format (RIF) is to be an effective means of exchanging rules (such as "business rules") in a way that is widely adopted in industry and that is consistent with existing W3C technologies.

W3C continues to work with community members to review and recommend new standards for the advancement and realization of the Semantic Web. In time for SemTech, W3C announces that SKOS and OWL, as Proposed Recommendations, are nearly complete. OWL 2 is a Candidate Recommendation, meaning it is considered technically sound and ready for implementation experience. OWL 2 builds on the original OWL standards (published in 2004) and adds features sought by the community. The basic design of RIF is now complete, and this week W3C expects to announce "Last Call" draft specifications, meaning the public can confirm the technical soundness of the document.

World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee declared the Semantic Web ‘open for business’ in 2008, celebrating the ratification of the SPARQL query specification by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); the organisation of which he is Director. “I think we’ve got all the pieces to be able to go ahead and do pretty much everything,” he stated in an interview. “You should be able to implement a huge amount of the dream, we should be able to get huge benefits from interoperability using what we’ve got. So, people are realising it’s time to just go do it.”

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IBM today announced the launch of a new suite of healthcare information sharing and analytics technologies at the Guang Dong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which combines the strengths of TCM and Modern Western Medicine (MWM). The system incorporates IBM’s advanced semantics technology which allows it to understand and analyze the scientific meaning of specific terms even when other terms are used in patient records.

This interview with Eric Miller, President of Zepheira was conducted by Golda Velez. http://zepheira.com

SR: Eric, let me ask your advice. The Semantic Web is interesting, exciting, promising. So say I’m a developer, how do I get involved with it? Or suppose I have a tech company, how do I get work in this field?

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