ISWC 2009 Industry Track

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The Industry Track will provide exhibition and speaking opportunities for vendors and users of Semantic Web products.

See the Call for Presentations.

Contents

Chairs

Matt Fisher

John Callahan

Accepted Talks

Tuesday 10/27/2009 4:00 - 5:30pm EST

Open Architectures for Open Government [Tues, 10/27, 4:00pm - 4:45pm], Cory Casanave, ModelDriven.org

Enabling open government requires that the architectural data for and about government be made part of the Linked Open Data cloud. Government has an enormous investment in architectures of all kinds: Enterprise architecture, Service Oriented Architecture, Process Architectures, Data Architectures, Systems Architectures, Data Schema, Etc. This valuable architectural data is currently locked up in a variety of standards and tools that are not generally accessible on the web as linked open data. Without access to this information we will have a hard time understanding the information, processes and services that are the foundations of what we are trying to make collaborative and open. This presentation and demonstration will highlight the critical role open architectures have in achieving open government and will show how current and future architectures can be published, federated, linked and analyzed as RDF based Linked Open Data. Open source technologies from ModelDriven.org will be demonstrated that allow current architectures to be published and managed and provide the framework for semantic integration of architectural information across the federal enterprise.

Cory Casanave is President and CEO of Model Driven Solutions. He can be reached at cory-c@modeldriven.com

Strengthen your SOA with Semantics [Tues, 10/27, 4:45pm - 5:30pm], John Hebeler and Andrew Perez-Lopez, BBN Technologies

SOA is the de-facto architectural standard for many large and small distributed solutions. The Semantic Web, with its flexible knowledge representation, is often seen as unrelated to many of the SOA challenges. However, semantics allow a SOA solution to achieve higher leverage of the available SOA services, improved quality of service (QoS), and smoother integration of new and modified services. Semantic advantages significantly increases the scale of SOA solutions to allow the incorporation of additional service diversity, service dynamics, and complex service missions. Much of the attention of SOA and semantics deals with service description and progress continues with technologies such as OWL-S and SAWSDL. These add semantic descriptions to a SOA service in addition to its syntactical description. However, in addition to this, semantics advances SOA goals in three other major ways; semantic-enabled services, semantic facades, and embedded semantics. A standard SPARQL endpoint offers a full fledged SOA service with a corresponding WSDL to enable the full incorporation of a knowledgebase into the SOA solution. Not only can a SOA solution open up its knowledgebase but can also tap into the many exiting SPARQL endpoints. A semantic facade can add a semantic layer to a web service or set of web services to achieve higher levels of abstraction to deal with availability, similarity, and coordination. Embedded semantics enables a service or set of services to leverage semantics without any impact to the SOA interface. All four methods offer ways to improve the SOA through the power, tools, and standards found in the Semantic Web. We outline each semantic addition to SOA, demonstrate examples, and categorize theme for their applicability in improving SOA solutions.

John Hebeler is a Division Scientist for BBN Technologies. He can be reached at jhebeler@semwebprogramming.org. Andrew Perez-Lopen is a Staff Scientist at BBN. He can be reached at andrew.perez.lopez@semwebprogramming.org

Thursday 10/26/2009 10:30am - 12:30pm

Descriptions, Ontologies, Collaboration and Governance [Thurs, 10/29, 10:30am - 11:15am], Mike Lang Jr. and Greg Milbank, Revelytix

Semantic SOA Governance is a methodology ensuring that business missions are mapped accurately to the Services Oriented Infrastructure and that the services developed are reusable and easily discoverable to facilitate deep analysis of the IT infrastructure, in terms of business operations and enterprise architecture. Two technologies, semantics and Business Process Management (BPM), when combined in a collaborative framework produce a dramatic new information management platform incorporating information management with Operational Governance capabilities.

For enterprises that are well into their SOA deployments it is apparent that SOA Governance should be considered in a much wider sense to include the issue of mapping the business requirements to the SOA implementation. Service requirements need to be defined by the business under a closely monitored collaboration and governance process. Before the IT team builds out the services, some amount of iteration is generally required between the business analyst and the IT group to get the requirements right. Formal business process modeling can be used to define the governance processes so that the implementation can be monitored and managed using BPM tools. The major advantage of this approach is the grounding of the processes for defining requirements and the requirements themselves in a formal semantic model, enabling the IT infrastructure to be analyzed within the context of the rest of the business.

Collaboration is vitally important in designing both the governance processes and the requirements for business missions. Through the use of our web-based modeling tool and intuitive interfaces, stakeholders from the business side are able to effectively work with their counterparts on the IT side to efficiently build models that accurately reflect naming conventions from both organizations. Using Knoodl, non modeling processional participate in the early modeling process and audit trails of the collaboration and process design lifecycles are recorded to facilitate governance and policy management.

Mike Lang Jr. is an Ontology Architect at Revelytix. He can be reached at mikelangjr@revelytix.com. Greg Milbank is President and Co-Founder of Revelytix. He can be reached at gregmilbank@revelytix.com

Bigdata: Enabling the Semantic Web at Web-Scale [Thurs, 10/29, 11:20am - 11:50am], Mike Personick, SYSTAP, LLC

Bigdata: Enabling The Semantic Web at Web-Scale Across many user communities, there exists a longstanding problem of being able to simultaneously consider large amounts of data from disparate sources in a single fused view for better analysis and decision making. Expressive Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and OWL have helped bring these communities much closer to solving the problem of federation and semantic alignment of heterogeneous structured and unstructured data, but RDF database technology has never been able to keep up with scale demands. Without the ability to reach scale, potential Semantic Web adopters turn to cloud computing technologies such as map/reduce, not fully understanding the tradeoffs between the two technologies. Bigdata is the first RDF database designed from the ground up to run at web-scale. At its core, bigdata is a horizontally-scaled, general purpose storage and computing fabric for ordered data (B+Trees), designed to operate on a cluster of commodity hardware. On top of that core is the bigdata RDF Store, a massively scalable RDF database supporting RDFS and OWL Lite reasoning, high-level query (SPARQL), and datum level provenance. This presentation discusses the bigdata architecture, how bigdata can be used to solve real-world problems, and the scalability and performance results achieved thus far.

Mike Personick is a SYSTAP principal and co-architect of bigdata. He can be reached at mike@systap.com

Systems Ontological Use-Cases [Thurs, 10/29, 12:00pm - 12:30pm], Gary Sikora, Progeny Systems

In the past several years, the US Navy has been one of the many organizations that has turned to semantics as a way of solving fundamental problems: data integration, system interoperability, data alignment and knowledge management to name a few. For this presentation, Progeny will detail their Semantic Web work currently underway as well as future endeavors in this space. Ranging from tactical deployments to C4I application, semantics will have a strong place in the software systems of the US Navy. This talk will focus on the technical aspects of several Naval programs, the challenges faced and the solutions deployed, desired artifacts and direction from the Semantic Web community going forward and lessons learned as feedback into the R&D and academic organizations.

Gary Sikora is Director of Information Technology. He can be reached at gsikora@progeny.net

Thursday 10/26/2009 2:00pm - 3:30pm

Moving Objects: Look in the Past, Manage the Present and Predict the Future [Thurs, 10/29, 2:00pm - 2:45pm], Craig Norvell, Franz, Inc.

We see an increased interest from telecom providers, the transportation industry and defense integrators in tracking hundreds of thousands to millions of objects in real time. Consider fleets of trucks, swarms of airplanes, track data for soldiers on the (urban) battle field, track data for endangered animals, or location based services like Loopt.

In this presentation we demonstrate an object database built using a RDF triple store. Our challenge was to track these objects both in real time, perform analysis on past movements and even offer some predictive analysis.

Traditional relational databases were too slow for real time handling of moving objects so we used in-memory techniques and algorithms used by large multiplayer games. This allowed us to efficiently deal with interesting proximity patterns in real time data. A typical query would be "Find another truck that can pick up package X at location Y so that I can pick up package A at location B so that we both will arrive at P before time T. Some of the real time data will go in the persistent database and for that we developed a new 3D indexing technique to efficiently deal with lat/long-time queries. This allowed us to do data-analysis about typical movement patterns over time dependent on the properties of objects.

We will discuss design choices, performance considerations and some example queries.

Craig Norvell is Franz's Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing. He can be reached at cnorvell@franz.com

Linked Data And The New York Times [Thurs, 10/29, 2:45pm - 3:30pm], Evan Sandhaus, New York Times

For the last 150 years, The New York Times has maintained one of the most authoritative news vocabularies ever developed. Starting in 1851, The New York Times has kept an index of its archives. 1 Published annually, this index is organized as an alphabetized list of subject headings followed by summaries of relevant articles. In its 150 years of operation, the Times Index has developed over a million subject headings, ranging from the everyday (‚'Politics and Government') to the obscure (‚'Foosball (Table Soccer)'). Each subject heading is selected to be unambiguous (i.e. ‚'George W. Bush (Pres)' and ‚'George H. W. Bush (Pres)') and is assigned to one of five categories: people, locations, organizations, descriptors and titles of authored works. In the aggregate, this collection of subject headings constitutes The New York Times Indexing Thesaurus.

At The 2009 Semantic Technology Conference, The Times announced our intention to release our Thesaurus and to map our subject headings onto publically available ontologies (e.g. dbpedia, FreeBase, Geo Commons). 234 By releasing this vocabulary as linked data, we hope to provide the community with a strong foundation for the exchange of linked open data in the news space.

In our presentation at ISWC we will follow up on our earlier announcement by:

  1. Announcing the release of an important subset of our Thesaurus in the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) format.
  2. Announcing further details of our linked data strategy.
  3. Describing how we arrived at our linked data strategy.
  4. Providing background on over 150 years of indexing and tagging at The Times.

Evan Sandhaus is a Semantic Technologist in the Research & Development Operations division at the New York Times Company. He can be reached at sandhes@nytimes.com

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