The PROOF (Prevention of Organ Failure) Centre at St. Paul’s Hospital, hosted by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, is one of those leading-edge research organizations aiming to move us a little closer to the world of precision medicine, with the help of semantic technology. In the process, it also hopes to have a positive impact on the high costs of health care.

That’s a problem not just in the U.S., but also in Canada where provincial governments bear the burden of rising health care costs, which make up 45 percent of the budget for British Columbia alone.

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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 !

The coolest thing at the 109^th International American Toy Fair in New York City this week might have been the Lazer Tag Blaster or the World of Warcraft version of Monopoly. Or, for semantic tech aficionados, it would have been Uma’s semantic Skin multitouch display installation. Even the Power Rangers were getting into it (see photo).

Here is the marriage of semantic technology with interactive signage and multi-touch displays, RFID technology, Intel’s Audience Impression Metrics suite, and social media integration. It is, as Christian Doegl, founder and CEO of uma, an example “where semantics gets tangible.”  And touchable by everyone.

For the Toy Fair, Uma got access to the exhibitor database, itself complete with structured metadata such as company name, location on the floor, and Twitter handle. “From this we can build up a semantic database connecting all different databases to the system,” says Doegl.

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Some of you here already know it – many others are still asking it though – “What is the Big Deal with Semantic Technology, we don’t get it.”

Fair Enough. If we had to pick one thing that crystallizes the importance of what we’re doing and link it a problem that just about everyone in IT faces today chances are we could change industry perceptions and make some real progress.

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I decided to conduct an informal survey in an attempt to gauge the current level of adoption and growth potential for Semantic Technology as an industry vertical. The results indicate to me that while progress is being made we still need to do a better job of delivering the message – this messaging problem is the number one reason why adoption of Semantic Technologies and Semantic Methodologies is proceeding slower than we had anticipated. 

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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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Over the past two years I’ve tried very hard to help define the potential application for this technology area in the context of Information Technology disciplines or problem spaces – out of those efforts has come a focus on:

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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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There are still many folks out there wondering exactly how Semantic Technology can add value within mainstream solutions architectures and practices. This is something that I’ve spent the last three years working on, specifically developing a set of IT practices which leverages an underlying methodology that we’ve discussed here before called “Semantic Integration” (SI). SI can be applied to any functional or industry domain because what it really represents is the first philosophical breakthrough for enterprise integration in decades. Some people may feel that SOA represented a similar breakthrough, but in fact it hasn’t. The reason SOA has fallen short is because of continued misunderstanding as to where the application architecture began and the middleware and data architecture ended. Semantic Integration avoids this critical flaw by virtue of the fact that it supports every tier of the architecture and is relevant in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. One of the most exciting practices that we’ve built atop Semantic Integration is dedicated to improving Cyber Security through unification of the many IT security stovepipes.  

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Part  1 – Understanding The Semantic Value Proposition

The term “Semantic Web” has developed some interesting yet confusing connotations since it was first introduced in the early 2000’s. Those misconceptions include but are not limited to:

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I should explain first, that In addition to my role at Semantic Universe, I oversee the annual educational conference on enterprise data management (EDM), called Enterprise Data World. About 900 enterprise data people will be converging on Tampa for the next event on April 5-9, 2009.

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