Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

With a three-year, $550,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, UT Dallas researchers will be delving into issues around the scalability of the semantic web, entity resolutions, and policy specification and reasoning.

The project, whose funding was announced in October, joins other semantic web research efforts taking place at UT Dallas funded by agencies such as the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, as well as collaborative efforts taking place with Raytheon Co. on creating semantic web technology that can find and analyze visual information.

The principal investigator for the project is Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham, a professor of computer science in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas. UT Dallas has been working with HP Labs in developing the JENA RDF engine. “but one problem is managing large, large graphs,” explains Thuraisingham.

“It’s very well to talk about the semantic web doing this, that, and the other thing,” but representing all this information requires very large graphs, he said. That’s where UT Dallas’ expertise in data mining, one area of specialization for Thuraisingham’s colleague Latifur Khan, will come in handy.

The entity resolution problem is one that is capturing the attention of many researchers. When the same word has different interpretations, ontologies are required to sort out what the particular reference is to. She uses her own name as an example of potential confusion: Bhavani is the name of a ferocious goddess in India, a river, and a city or town, as well as her own name. That ambiguity needs to be resolved. While she can’t provide details at this point, she notes that UT Dallas is looking at some clustering techniques as a unique approach to dealing with these issues.

One of the reasons the government is interested in the semantic web is related to the issues of data sharing, springing from the 9/11 tragedy where information that might have helped target the terrorists in advance of the attacks had not been shared among different agencies. The semantic web opens the door to making the data that users want to get more available, useful and relevant, but what should be shared and policies around how that data should be shared will be an issue, whether it’s within government agencies or among parties such as health care practitioners, insurance providers, and patients, or even within various social networks.

“You have to enforce policies,” says Thuraisingham, whose background is in data security and information management, including the semantic web. Previous to coming to UT Dallas she also worked at NSF. “You can’t give everything to everyone. So in addition to the semantic web technologies for common interpretations and so on, how will we use the semantic web to specify policies and reason about them. For example, if I give this certain information out, should I give this other information out as well.”

Not a lot of work has been done on this front, she says. The NSF is more interested in the security aspect in terms of protecting who that data is shared with, and how it is shared. “Semantic web technologies can be used for specifications, for representing the data and the policies,” she says.

UT Dallas also is investigating other issues around the semantic web, including using semantics to reason about required resources in cloud computing environments and the geospatial semantic web — that is, how do you bring in semantic web technologies to manage maps and graphs. It’s working on developing geospatial RDF with Raytheon.

While UT Dallas has done well in its partnerships and funding on the semantic web front, Thuraisingham says it’s her impression that European governments are still more invested in funding on this front.

“Europeans seem to be a lot more advanced than the U.S. because they really are putting a lot of funding,” says Thuraisingham, who funded work while at the NSF by such high-profile names in the semantic web space as Dr. James Hendler. But even then it wasn’t as part of a focused semantic web program, but funded as part of other programs. Now, however, the intelligence community wants to emphasize more on the semantic web, she says, to realize solutions to some of the challenging problems of collecting, sharing and understanding data. So she’s hopeful of greater interest and investment by the government.

“The semantic web is now becoming very real,” she says. “It’s not hype but something very tangible.”

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