Semantic Technology in the
Real World:
Experiences
and Lessons based on Commercialization of Academic Research & Industry
Applications
Amit Sheth, Semagix, Ltd. and LSDIS Lab, The
Semantics is seen as the key ingredient in
the next phase of the Web infrastructure as well as the next generation of
information systems applications.
Ontology is the
centerpiece of the most prevalent approaches for realizing the Semantic Web,
and provides the basis of representing, acquiring and utilizing knowledge.
Ontology-driven
techniques and systems have already enabled new generation of Semantic
Applications in such markets as bioinformatics, financial services, business
intelligence, and national security. The
applications of semantic technologies, in increasing sophistication, range from
·
semantic
search and browsing,
·
semantic
integration of heterogeneous enterprise-wide and pan-web content, and
·
analytics
and discovery, leading to actionable information and insights.
In this talk, we
present one of the more mature semantic technologies with origins in academic
research (LSDIS Lab’s SCORE
technology), that has been commercialized (Semagix Freedom). Based on some experience in recent commercial
applications, we outline core functional capabilities that have proved to be
important. This includes the ability to
create and maintain large domain and task ontologies (with description base of multi-million
objects), automatic classification, automatic semantic metadata extraction and
enhancement, and high performance semantic query processing. We conclude with a series of observations of
potential interest to the Semantic Web research community on the topics
of: ontology quality, ontology language
expressiveness, ontology size and freshness, automatic semantic metadata
extraction, content heterogeneity, etc.
Background
information for this talk can be found at:
Article in Data Engineering
special issue on Making the Semantic Web Real (Dec. 2003) http://wwwt.semagix.com/documents/SemanticWebTechinAction.pdf
Commercial Technology: http://www.semagix.com/download.html
Research: Semantic
Association and Semantic Discovery Projects: http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/proj/proj.html
Publications and
Presentations: http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/lib/lib.html
Speaker Biography
Amit Sheth is a professor at The University of Georgia
(UGA) and CTO of
Semagix, Ltd. He started the LSDIS lab
at UGA in 1994. For nine years before, he served in R&D groups at Bellcore,
Unisys, and Honeywell. In August 1999, Dr. Sheth founded Taalee, Inc.,
based on the technology developed at the LSDIS lab, and managed it as CEO until
June 2001. Following acquisition/merger of Taalee and its follow-on Voquette
resulting in Semagix, he currently serves as its CTO. His research has
led to three significant commercial products, several deployed applications,
and over 175 publications. He has given 18 keynotes and over 150 invited
talks/colloquia.