Sing along with me to this classic hit from 1980: “Knowledge graphs are everywhere; They’re everywhere; My mind describes them to me.”

Our Daughter’s Wedding’s song Lawn Chairs. But it’s a good description of some of the activity at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference this week, which saw Google, Yahoo and Wikidata chatting up the topic of Knowledge Graphs. On Tuesday, for example, Google’s Jason Douglas provided insight into how the search giant’s Knowledge Graph is critical to meeting a new world of search requirements that’s focused on providing answers and acting in an anticipatory way (see story here), while Wednesday’s closing keynote had Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. project director Denny Vrandecic getting the audience up to date with Wikidata – aka, Wikipedia’s Knowledge Graph For, And By, Everyone.

There are some 280 language versions of Wikipedia for which Wikidata serves as the common source of structured data. Wikidata now has an entity base of more than 12 million items that represent the topics of Wikipedia articles, Vrandecic said during his presentation.

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An audience hungry for more knowledge about what Google is doing with structured data got its fill late in the day Tuesday at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference. Jason Douglas, Group Product Manager, Knowledge Graph, presented to the SRO crowd the link between semantic technology and structured data to the changing world of search.

“Search is changing dramatically because users’ lives are changing dramatically,” Douglas said. “We carry our computers with us. The Internet is with us all the time.” While a decade ago the library analogy worked for search, but increasingly users need more on-the-go, just-in-time information. So, today’s search analogy, he said, is more along the lines of the personal assistant – it’s more about giving users answers, and anticipating their needs.

The only way to meet those requirements is for search engines to have an understanding of the real world, to be the virtual equivalent of a real-world personal assistant who knows what and where things are and how they relate to each other. “On the answer side, if we actually know things about the world, it’s not just answering questions [themselves], but providing all kinds of context that helps in different ways,” Douglas said.

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What are the possibilities for RDF (Resource Description Framework) as a Universal Healthcare Exchange Language? It’s an issue to be explored next week at a SemTechBiz workshop in San Francisco.

The healthcare sector is rife with medical vocabularies and localized terminologies. In fact, says David Booth, Senior Software Architect, KnowMED, one of the leaders of the upcoming event, “some people have characterized the problem as not being one of a lack of vocabularies but of too many vocabularies.” To some extent that can’t be helped, because specific languages have grown up with various medical specialties and healthcare subdomains. What can be helped, though, is to create semantic connections among these vocabularies, to avoid the disconnects that can harm patients, researchers, and others.

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As Linked Data matures across the web – courtesy of efforts such as that underway by the Linked Data Platform Working Group to mandate publishing data in RDF and to use the HTTP protocol, (see our story here) – anyone running a website is going to need to know how to manage it. That, says Geoffrey Bock, principal at strategic marketing and insight services firm  Bock & Company, is going to make the popular Drupal platform for managing web content even more important.

Drupal 7 brought to the platform the ability to manage semantic metadata by incorporating RDF as a core capability, in a module that outputs RDFa. From the end user’s point of view the task of managing the metadata is made very easy through the familiar editing environment, says Bock. He will be co-hosting the session, How Drupal 7 Manages Linked Data for Smart Web Experiences, at the SemTechBiz conference in San Francisco in June. He’ll be joined by Stéphane Corlosquet, software enginner at Acquia Inc., the company co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, which provides cloud, SaaS, and other services to organizations building websites on Drupal. Corlosquet was a critical force in bringing semantic web capabilities to Drupal’s core, with roles including being the maintainer of the RDF module in Drupal 7 a member of the Drupal security team.

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It’s time to get real with Linked Data. The World Wide Web Consortium’s Linked Data Platform Working Group, convened almost a year ago, is on the case, with expectations by June to publish a last call working draft of the specification, and to have a final recommendation, the last stage of the W3C’s standards process, by early next year.

“The Linked Data Platform is expanding on the concept [originally] put forward by Tim Berners-Lee on his web site, to turn it into a specification,” says Arnaud J. Le Hors, co-chair of the working group and IBM’s Linked Data Standards Lead. He will address the work at this session during next month’s SemTechBiz conference in San Francisco.

Why the need to formalize Linked Data?  While there is a fairly significant list of W3C standards around the Semantic Web, the more loosely-defined Linked Data has led to an environment where interoperability suffers. That’s because people are left to solve the same problems, such as those around publishing and retrieving data, over and over again, and they take different paths to get there, Le Hors says. The guides that are out there are just that, guides, with people free to use or ignore them, if they can even find them – which in itself isn’t easy to do for those who aren’t well-informed members of the community, he says.

The Linked Data Platform extends the model to provide the industry with a formal definition for read-write access to Linked Data; it mandates publishing data in a standard format, RDF, and using a standard protocol, HTTP, “which is completely symmetrical with the way the web works today, with HTML and HTTP,” Le Hors says.

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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

We continue our discussion from yesterday of what enterprise IT will learn to love about semantic technologies at the upcoming SemTechBiz conference (the story began here):

Another Score For Data Agility

Looked at from the data warehouse point of view by Thomas Kelly, Practice Director, Enterprise Information Management, for Cognizant Technology Solutions, semantic technology makes it possible to apply Agile development practices to the data warehouse itself. “You can start modeling, work with data, generate analytics and then start tuning based on what you learn,” says Kelly, who will be discussing semantic technology for the data warehousing practitioner at this session. Several semantic technology-based practices can be applied that support iterative, evolutionary improvements with little or no impact to data loading and analytics functions that were built before the refinements were made, he says.

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Why should enterprise IT leaders start steeping themselves in semantic technologies? The answer to that question will become apparent to anyone attending the June Semantic Technology & Business conference in San Francisco, where many sessions will explore the value CIOs and their staffs can gain from going semantic. (You can register for SemTechBiz here.)

Let’s start with the problem of forcing enterprise knowledge workers into rigid procedures to accomplish their activities, the result of having to adhere to flow-charted business processes whose silo’d components are pieced together via fixed integration points. Dave Duggal, co-founder and managing director of EnterpriseWeb LLC, will paint a picture at this session instead of a world of smart, connected business processes to stand up a team of empowered and interactive knowledge workers. Once accorded certain rules-enabled permissions and information access rights, those employees can put their smarts to work “to do their jobs in a goal-oriented way to meet the objectives of the organization,” as Duggal explains it.

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The 2013 Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco is fast approaching. The conference, which will run June 2-5, will combine innovative panels, case studies, tutorials, roundtables, keynotes, and lightning sessions that will give you an unparalleled interactive experience. Starting things off with a splash, the opening keynotes will feature speakers from WalmartLabs and Viacom.

Opening Keynotes:

How to Connect People and Products Using Big, Fast, and Heterogeneous Data with Abhishek Gattani, Senior Director, Distinguished Architect – WalmartLabs

With over 200 million people walking into stores each week, 43+ million unique visitors per month online, and access to the full twitter fire-hose (i.e. 200 million tweets per day), WalmartLabs is processing large amounts of data to help connect people to products and also provide unexpected insights to merchants. How do we turn this data into insights? How do we combine data internal to an enterprise with social data such as tweets and data from the “traditional” Web such as Wikipedia? When is social and web data useful? These are key questions when building any Big Data system. In this talk, Abhishek will discuss WalmartLabs’ work in this area and give examples of where social and web data was used to solve some key challenges faced when building the eCommerce search engine of the world’s largest retailer. Read more

The W3C has announced that eleven specifications of SPARQL 1.1 have been published as recommendations. SPARQL is the Semantic Web query language.  We caught up with Lee Feigenbaum, VP Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics Inc. to discuss the significance of this announcement. Feigenbaum is a SPARQL expert who currently serves as the Co-Chair of the W3C’s SPARQL Working Group, leading the design of SPARQL.

Feigenbaum says, “SPARQL 1.1 is a huge leap forward in providing a standard way to access and update Semantic Web data. By reaching W3C Recommendation status, Semantic Web developers, vendors, publishers and consumers have a stable, well-vetted, and interoperable set of standards they can rely on for the foreseeable future.”

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