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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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

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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

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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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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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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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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 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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Courtesy: Flickr/epSos.de

At the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in New York City last week, attendees got to hear a lot about how semantic technology is influencing various sectors, such as government (see our stories here and here) and media (see this article and this one). Another prominent one on display: pharmaceuticals.

Pharma, for example, was the driving use case for the update to Callimachus that focuses on helping users deal with data that’s external to the framework for data-driven applications, David Wood, CTO of Callimachus project sponsor 3 Round Stones, told The Semantic Web Blog at the event. (To learn more about the update, see our story here.)

A session on Tuesday last week saw Lee Feigenbaum, vp of marketing at Cambridge Semantics, which makes the Anzo express and Anzo Enterprise solutions,  put forth a case for semantic tech as being key to data integration and interoperability in the sector, as well. “Can semantic web technologies break down enterprise data silos just as they break down document silos on the web?” he said. “The answer to the question is, “Of course.” Compared to the web, the data silo challenges of even the largest pharmaceuticals organization is relatively minor.”

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With so many people today in possession of a smart phone with built-in GPS capabilities, there’s a new opportunity to capture so much data about what individuals do – especially those with chronic conditions – as well as the distance parameters related to where they’re doing it, the times they set out for an activity, how they’re feeling at various times during the day, and a whole lot more. “Chronic disease in some ways is the killer app for this kind of mobile health technology,” Estrin noted, since most of the care for dealing with chronic conditions occurs outside the clinical setting.

The capture is the easy part, says Estrin – much of it can be automated or be entered via a simple click, for instance. “The heavy lifting is in the analysis, in fusing and pulling out what is interesting from those data streams,” Estrin told an audience at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in New York City on Wednesday.

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Yet, challenges remain to leveraging all the possibilities of Hadoop, an Apache Software Foundation open source project, especially as it relates to empowering the data scientist. Hadoop is composed of two sub-projects: HDFS, a distributed file system built on a cluster of commodity hardware so that data stored in any node can be shared across all the servers, and the MapReduce framework for processing the data stored in those files.

Semantic technology can help solve many of the  challenges, Michael A. Lang Jr., VP, Director of Ontology Engineering Services at Revelytix, Inc., told an audience gathered at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in New York City yesterday.

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“The future of rNews 1.0 is rNews .1.1,” said Stuart Myles, deputy director of schema standards at the Associated Press who also heads up the International Press Telecommunications’ Council’s Semantic Web work. At next week’s IPTC meeting a vote will be taken on V. 1.1, with its adoption the hopeful outcome.

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At this week’s Semantic Technology & Business Conference in NYC, Andrew Nicklin of the Office of Strategic Technology and Development, NYC Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT) provided a look at what has been accomplished so far, and what’s on the to-do roadmap. Recent months have seen accomplishments including the passage of Local Law 11 of 2012 – the “most progressive legislation in the U.S. as far as cities being mandated to open data,” Nicklin said in an interview with The Semantic Web Blog before his keynote address at SemTech. “It ensures permanency for our program past any administrative changes….The whole notion of open data doesn’t go way because it is written into law.”

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