Steve Hamby recently attested that semantic technology is one of the three main solutions that has shown success at taming Big Data, the other two being cloud computing and natural language processing. Hamby writes, “The May 2001 Scientific American article ‘The Semantic Web’ by Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler, and Ora Lassila described the Semantic Web as agents that query ontologies representing human knowledge to find information requested by a human. OWL ontology is based on Description Logics, which are both expressive and decidable, and provide a foundation for developing precise models about various domains of knowledge.”

Hamby continues, “These ontologies provide the ‘memory index’ that enables searches across vast amounts of data to return relevant, actionable information, while addressing key data trust challenges as well. The ability to deliver semantics to a mobile device, such as what the recent release of the iPhone 4S does with Siri, is an excellent step in taming the Big Data beast, since users can get the data they need when and where they need it. Big Data continues to grow, but semantic technologies provide the needed check points to properly index vital information in methods that imitate the way humans think.”

Read more here. Hamby will also be on hand at the upcoming SemTechBiz DC Conference. His presentation at the conference is entitled Simplified Semantics: Real World Use Cases of Semantic Technology in the Cloud.

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