Semantic Visualization:

Interfaces for exploring and exploiting ontology, knowledgebase, heterogeneous content and complex relationships

 

Amit Sheth, LSDIS Lab, The University of Georgia, and Semagix, Ltd.  

 

NASA Virtual Iron Bird Workshop, Montery, CA, April 2, 2004.

 

A lifecycle spanning development and use of a real-world semantic application often involves interactions will broad variety of data, information and knowledge.   Based on experiences and results from academic research (at the LSDIS lab) to deployed commercial semantic applications (by Semagix, Inc.), and from academic tools to commercial products, this talk will provide an extensive walk through (examples) of interactive and graphical interfaces developed in context of defining, interacting with, and utilizing data, metadata, and ontologies represented or stored as unstructured text and media content, XML, RDF, and OWL documents, databases and repositories.  Some of the issues we will cover include:

  • ontology definition/representation at the schema or description level, which typically involve tens of classes and relationships for a targeted domain or task ontology such as anti-money laundering, terrorism, pharmaceutical drug discovery, Glycan structure, etc. (an average domain or task ontology has tens of classes and relationship types, although some may be larger, depending on representation language, etc.)
  • ontology at the knowledgebase (i.e., ontology description base or population) level (the median ontology we have developed has more than million objects and more than a million relationship instances)
  • metadata or semantic annotations of heterogeneous (unstructured, semi-structured, and structured) content, and annotated documents
  • semantic search/querying and browsing, creation of context-driven query interfaces, display of contextually related results of text, audio and video data
  • specification of complex analytical queries and display of complex relationships in the result sets

 

Selected 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

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 and co-founder 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 companies, three significant commercial products, several deployed applications, two patents, and over 150 publications. He has given 19 keynotes and over 125 invited talks/colloquia. He is a co-editor of a new book series on Semantic Web, is on five journal editorial board, and has organized 10+ international conferences/workshops including several in the area of semantic interoperability and the Semantic Web.