On Friday, May 11, a group of Semantic Technology thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about Semantics in the Financial Services Industry, and “the Linkers” were joined by special guest, Lee Feigenbaum, VP Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics. Lee shared insights gained over many years working in the semantic technology field and with numerous customers in the financial services industry.
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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

This year was the 21st World Wide Web Conference located in Lyon, France. This conference is a unique forum for discussion about how the Web is evolving. There were hundreds of talks over 3 days. Let me summarize some Semantic Web presentations I was able to attend.

NautiLOD

Programmers daily use the wget tool to specify and retrieve data on the Web. However, wget is limited since it cannot dig into the semantics of Web data to do the job. What if you were to add semantics to wget? This is the question that Valeria Fionda, Claudio Gutierrez and Giuseppe Pirró asked themselves. They took that question to the next level: imagine a semantic wget on top of Linked Data. They wanted to create a language to declaratively specify portions of the Web of Data, define routes and instruct agents that can do things for you on the Web. All this by exploiting the semantics of information (RDF data) found in online data sources. For example, find all the Wikipedia pages of directors that have been influenced by Stanley Kubrick and send them to my email; retrieving information about David Lynch from different information providers only gives a hint of what can be done. The researchers developed a simple, generic declarative language, NautiLOD and implemented it in swget (semantic wget). swget comes in two flavors: a simple command line tool (to give the Web back to users) and a GUI. This is not a fantasy anymore. Check it our for yourself (http://swget.wordpress.com).

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What does the compliance lifecycle look like at your company? In globally-operating industries such as finance, there’s likely a herd of people charged with monitoring rules and regulations across countries, drafting policies and procedures for individual geographies or business units, and working to ensure controls are in place to prevent and detect violations. And that herd of individuals in some respects may be trying to herd cats, given how often aspects of compliance regulations change.

The situation presents the ideal use case for semantic technology, says Cambridge Semantics’ co-founder and VP of Technology and Client Services Lee Feigenbaum: There’s data to consider from a wealth of sources, from internal documents and control databases describing what is necessary to enforce policy at different areas and levels of the business and what reports are needed to ascertain compliance, to regulatory information published on governing bodies’ web sites or RSS feeds; people are working cross-organizationally within the company and in conjunction with the regulatory organizations; and the rules regularly change. At yesterday’s Demystifying Financial Services Semantics conference in New York City, it demonstrated its just-released Compliance Information Management Solution Accelerator, based on its Anzo semantic technology, to deliver information integration across multiple data sources, as well as an editor workplace where compliance officers or others managing these tasks can contribute and track content changes and workflow, and then seamlessly bring together the compliance content applicable to particular business units or geographies.

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Lee Feigenbaum recently argued that “semantic web software must be easy to use.” He explains, “On the surface, this sounds a bit trite. Surely we should demand that all software be easy to use, right? While ease of use is clearly an important goal in software design in general, I’d argue that it’s absolutely crucial to successfully realizing the value from Semantic Web software.” Read more

Lee Feigenbaum’s latest article shares insights into how the Semantic Web is letting us do more than ever before, and do it faster. He writes, “The bottom line is this: The Semantic Web lets you do things fast. And because you can do things fast, you can do lots more things than you could before. You can afford to do things that fail (fail fast); you can afford to do things that are unproven and speculative (exploratory analysis); you can afford to do things that are only relevant this week or today (on-demand or situational applications); and you can afford to do things that change rapidly.” Read more

Lee Feigenbaum recently wrote an article on the value of semantic web technologies, noting in particular the value of making semantic technologies common, coherent, and standard. Feigenbaum writes, “Semantic Web technologies are broadly applicable to many, many different use cases. People use them to publish pricing data online, to uncover market opportunities, to integrate data in the bowels of corporate IT, to open government data, to promote structured scientific discourse, to build open social networks, to reform supply chain inefficiencies, to search employee skill sets, and to accomplish about ten thousand other tasks.” Read more

SPARQL is the standardized query language for RDF, the same way SQL is the standardized query language for relational databases. If this is the first time you look at SPARQL, but you’re familiar with SQL, you will see some similarities because it shares several keywords such as SELECT, WHERE, etc. It also has new keywords that you have never seen if you come from a SQL world such as OPTIONAL, FILTER and much more.

Recall that RDF is a triple comprised of a subject, predicate and object. A SPARQL query consists of a set of triples where the subject, predicate and/or object can consist of variables. The idea is to match the triples in the SPARQL query with the existing RDF triples and find solutions to the variables. A SPARQL query is executed on a RDF dataset, which can be a native RDF database, or on a Relational Database to RDF (RDB2RDF) system, such as Ultrawrap.  These databases have SPARQL endpoints which accept queries and return results via HTTP.

A basic example

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Lee Feigenbaum recently wrote an article regarding the question he gets asked most often by potential business customers regarding the semantic web, questions that are usually misplaced. The question is, What can I do with Semantic Web technologies that I can’t do otherwise? Feigenbaum writes, “It’s a question that’s asked in good faith: enterprise software buyers have heard tales of rapid data integration, automated data inference, business-rules engines, etc. time and time again.” Read more

Ask a group of Semantic Web professionals where the data should live when you’re doing data integration projects – which is just what Cambridge Semantics VP Lee Feigenbaum, acting in his capacity as co-chair of the W3C’s SPARQL Working Group, did at a panel at last week’s SemTech – and don’t expect to get a single, agreed-upon answer.

Among the choices:

“Federation will crush warehousing,” Eric Prud’hommeaux of the W3C and its Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group said with an eye to provocation. “Leave data where the authorities have it and take advantage of individual domain contributions.” The basic idea of federation is that data stays in its source systems and you do integration dynamically, querying source systems on the fly.

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Date: May 26, 2010, 11:00AM (1 hour)
Register: View the recorded webcast

In 2008-2009, Lee Feigenbaum gave a series of presentations (PART I; PART II) for Semantic Universe on SPARQL, the query language of the Semantic Web. This year, SPARQL is going through some major updates with the release of SPARQL 1.1, and in this webcast, Lee has agreed to revisit the topic to discuss specifically some of what has changed. Lee will use real queries that can be run against real data on the Web to demonstrate the structure and features of SPARQL. SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS: "What's coming in SPARQL 1.1?" http://www.slideshare.net/LeeFeigenbaum/sparql2-status "SPARQL By Example" http://www.cambridgesemantics.com/2008/09/sparql-by-example "SPARQL Cheat Sheet" http://www.slideshare.net/LeeFeigenbaum/sparql-cheat-sheet * At SemTech 2010, June 21-25, Lee and his colleague Eric Prud'hommeaux, will give a full half-day, hands-on tutorial on SPARQL 1.1.

Presenters:

Lee Feigenbaum
Cambridge Semantics

Lee Feigenbaum has been using Semantic Web technologies to architect and develop enterprise middleware and applications since 2003. He brings this expertise to his role as Cambridge Semantics’s VP of Technology and Standards, where he is responsible for the design and development of the Anzo family of semantic applications and middleware. Lee is the author of Glitter, a pluggable SPARQL engine designed to query multiple data sources. Lee served as Chair of the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group, publishing the SPARQL query language and protocol specifications. Lee co-authored "The Semantic Web in Action," a December 2007 article in Scientific American. Before joining Cambridge Semantics, Lee spent five years as an engineer with IBM’s Advanced Internet Technology Group. There, his experiences spanned knowledge management and annotation systems, instant-messaging software, and Web-based client application runtimes. Lee writes about Semantic Web technologies at his blog, TechnicaLee Speaking.