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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What could you build if the entire web was your database?

A hackathon has been added to the agenda of the Semantic Technology & Business Conference. Semantic Hack, organized by SemanticWeb.com and Diffbot, will be an opportunity for developers and designers to work with RDF, SPARQL, OWL, entity extraction, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, newly available datasets, and other semantic technologies that help make the web more readable, accessible and dynamic for humans and more interpretable by machines. Semantic Hack is free to attend and prior experience with semantics is NOT required to participate.

Registration is open, but space is limited. Hackathon organizers are currently seeking coaches and sponsors; those interested in either role should contact the organizers.

• Who: Developers, designers, and others interested in semantic technology
• What: A day-long hackathon to build applications that help further expand the semantic web, or demonstrate the power of accessible web data
• Where: Hilton San Francisco Union Square
• When: Saturday, June 1, 2013, 9am – 9pm

Current sponsors include Bosatsu Consulting, The National Center for Biomedical Ontology, Protégé, and Stardog.

http://SemanticHack.eventbrite.com

There’s still time to make a speaking proposal for the Semantic Technology & Business Conference, June 2-5 in San Francisco.

Once again, we plan to make it the biggest and most comprehensive educational conference on the business of semantic technologies. Contribute to this event by sharing the practical experience you have gained in your own semantic projects. Speaking offers numerous benefits including an unparalleled platform to gain exposure for your institution; increased credibility for your business, project or team; and the opportunity to convey your goals and vision with an audience of attendees from around the world.

We are looking for case studies big and small – whether you’re building a semantic start-up, a large enterprise implementation, or you’ve done semantic annotation on a local business web site. They are all relevant, because the curiosity of the audience is so rich and diverse. We are looking for 3-hour tutorials, 45-minute breakout sessions and panels, and 5 minute lightning talks.

The Call for Presentations ends this Friday, January 18, so get your abstract together now. All the information you need and the links to submit your presentation proposal, are HERE.

Proposals will be reviewed by our outstanding Program Advisory Committee.

Conference registration is also open. Register by February 7 and save with substantial early bird discounts.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at Eric[ at ]SemanticWeb.com

Thanks,

Eric Franzon & Stewart Quealy
Conference Co-Chairs

Courtesy: Flickr/LadyDragonflyCC <3

Yesterday we began our look back at the year in semantic technology here. Today we continue with more expert commentary on the year in review:

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead:

I would mention two things (among many, of course).

•  Schema.org had an important effect on semantic technologies. Of course, it is controversial (role of one major vocabulary and its relations to others, the community discussions on the syntax, etc.), but I would rather concentrate on the positive aspects. A few years ago the topic of discussion was whether having ‘structured data’, as it is referred to (I would simply say having RDF in some syntax or other), as part of a Web page makes sense or not. There were fairly passionate discussions about this and many were convinced that doing that would not make any sense, there is no use case for it, authors would not use it and could not deal with it, etc. Well, this discussion is over. Structured data in Web sites is here to stay, it is important, and has become part of the Web landscape. Schema.org’s contribution in this respect is very important; the discussions and disagreements I referred to are minor and transient compared to the success. And 2012 was the year when this issue was finally closed.
•  On a very different aspect (and motivated by my own personal interest) I see exciting moves in the library and the digital publishing world. Many libraries recognize the power of linked data as adopted by libraries, of the value of standard cataloging techniques well adapted to linked data, of the role of metadata, in the form of linked data, adopted by journals and soon by electronic books… All these will have a profound influence bringing a huge amount of very valuable data onto the Web of Data, linking to sources of accumulated human knowledge. I have witnessed different aspects of this evolution coming to the fore in 2012, and I think this will become very important in the years to come.

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Courtesy: Flickr/zoetnet

As we close out 2012, we’ve asked some semantic tech experts to give us their take on the year that was. Was Big Data a boon for the semantic web, or is the opportunity to capitalize on the connection still pending? Is structured data on the web not just the future but the present? What sector is taking a strong lead in the semantic web space?

We begin with Part 1, with our experts listed in alphabetical order:

John Breslin, lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider:
I think the schema.org initiative really gaining community support and a broader range of terms has been fantastic. It’s been great to see an easily understandable set of terms for describing the objects in web pages, but also leveraging the experience of work like GoodRelations rather than ignoring what has gone before. It’s also been encouraging to see the growth of Drupal 7 (which produces RDFa data) in the government sector: Estimates are that 24 percent of .gov CMS sites are now powered by Drupal.

Martin Böhringer, CEO & Co-Founder Hojoki:

For us it was very important to see Jena, our Semantic Web framework, becoming an Apache top-level project in April 2012. We see a lot of development pace in this project recently and see a chance to build an open source Semantic Web foundation which can handle cutting-edge requirements.

Still disappointing is the missing link between Semantic Web and the “cool” technologies and buzzwords. From what we see Semantic Web gives answers to some of the industry’s most challenging problems, but it still doesn’t seem to really find its place in relation to the cloud or big data (Hadoop).

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

One trend that I have seen is increased interest in the broader spectrum of semantic technologies in the enterprise. Graph stores, NoSQL, schema-less and more flexible systems, ontologies (& ontologists!) and integration with legacy systems. I believe the Big Data movement has had a positive impact on this field. We are hearing more and more about “Big Data Analytics” from our clients, partners and friends. The analytical power brought to bear by the semantic technology stack is sparking curiosity – what is it really? How can these models help me mitigate risk, more accurately predict outcomes, identify hidden intellectual assets, and streamline business processes? Real questions, tough questions: fun challenges!

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Is it time for the enterprise to lose the idea of the holy grail of a central repository of multi-sourced data?

Experts in the semantic web space think that’s the case. At the recent Semantic Web Technology and Business Conference in New York City, a few weighed in on the issue.

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It’s probably safe to say that people want their firefighters, EMT, law enforcement and other emergency responders to be as best-equipped for their jobs as possible, so that they can be successful and well-protected, too.

Semantic technology can have a hand in making sure that happens. Deborah McGuinness, Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor and Director of Web Science Operations John Erickson. both of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) , are spearheading an effort, thanks to some funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST) under program manager William G. Billotte, to use semantic technology and social media to help that organization better understand what requirements should be for these heroes.

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Last week at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in New York City, attendees got a chance to learn – or perhaps be reminded – of the business value of semantic technology at a host of keynotes and presentations. One of them specifically on that topic was hosted by Christopher A. Moran, CTO of consulting company IMSC, which provides information management services to clients in the DoD, civilian and intelligence agencies.

Some takeaways from the discussion follow:

• With semantic technology, extending what the organization knows about something – its customer  accounts, for instance – doesn’t have to result in a big system overhaul. The added value the business gets comes as “simply an extension to the [semantic] graph,” as Moran termed it. Each system need only be designed to use the graph database.

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A couple of years back, The Semantic Web Blog visited with Vijay Bulusu to gain some insight into how pharma giant Pfizer Inc. was moving forward with semantic technology (see article here). At last week’s Semantic Technology and Business Conference in New York City, Bulusu, director, informatics and innovation at Pfizer, provided additional perspective on the issue – first, during the presentation on Using Linked Semantic Data in Biomedical Research and Pharmaceuticals (see coverage of that here), and then in a follow-up conversation.

A struggle for pharma companies, Bulusu notes, sits in driving standards for data that exists across system silos, so it is broadly applicable across groups. A transaction like creating a batch of materials, doing analytical testing on it and enabling clinical trial releases is the work of multiple groups of people in departments like R&D entering data across different systems.

The foundational layer needed to support data aggregation in a persistent graph semantic database and visualization with collaborative, semantic knowledge maps “is all about data already in transactional, silo’d systems,” Bulusu says. “We want to make sure that across those systems, key data is entered consistently for entities.” That means limiting them to selecting via a drop-down list from a vocabulary that is consistently managed and published from a single source to all these transaction systems, so the same entity is called by the same name as it traverses systems to support analytics and other requirements. That, he says, “is where we directly impact the day-to-day operational work of users.”

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