The Internet is in the middle of yet another revolution, the advancement of the Semantic Web: a large, sprawling, contradictory, confusing set of tools, standards, ad hoc implementations, and sometimes warm attitudes. For about the first half, I’ll talk about the Semantic Web in general, emphasizing its main goal: to let software communicate better with other software, in service of the user. The “meaning” in “semantic” applies to machine understanding! Surprise! I’ll try to match the content to the needs of the audience, but I’ll mention RDF (triples), Ontologies (including reasoning), SPARQL (a query language), existing major services and tools (Google, Powerset, Reuters, Dbpedia), Lucene for text analysis, Allegro for triple store. As many as I have time for.
The second half of the talk is about the website text enhancement tools that I’m obsessed with. And their application to knowledge presentation – in particular Meteorological information. Please excuse me in advance for my attempt to discuss a domain where I’m not expert. My goal will be to raise questions, to poke at problems, and to suggest some directions.
Oz DiGennaro has been active in software and hardware development for thirty years, and has experienced the computer revolution first-hand. His work has included computer graphics, speech recognition, factory automation, image processing, printers, telecom, RFID, and web services for malaria control.
In addition to being an accomplished software developer, Oz has been an avid participant in the advance of the Internet. Oz worked with UNIX (version 1.0) on DEC PDP-11 using the newly-invented (and very strange language) called “C”, in 1979. He encountered the new “object-oriented methodology” in the early 1980’s; and he experienced email and “www” browsing in the early 1990’s.
Startup Experience
In the early 1980’s Oz was software manager at Verbex, owned by Exxon Enterprises. This was a division of Exxon that today we would call “venture capital”. The software developed at Verbex, after many re-incarnations appears as Dragon Systems today.
As CTO, Oz has run a startup doing customization and integration of high-end image processing systems (Signum Inc.).
In engineering management, Oz worked with an RFID startup from its “garage” stage (five employees working in 500 square feet) to receiving $18M from VC organizations (Skyetek).
Recently Oz served as CTO of Volkscast, an HD video acquisition and distribution startup out of New York City.
Now, Oz is Founder and CTO of Galgal Systems developing a suite of website enhancement tools: “4Dtext”.
Wikipedia article about Semantic Media Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki
Wikipedia article about Semantic Sensor Web
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Sensor_Web
Wikipedia article about Open Geospatial Consortium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Geospatial_Consortium
Wikipedia article about OWL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language
Open Geospatial Consortium main websiet
http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/sensorweb
W3C incubator for Semantic Sensor Network
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/
W3C incubator for Semantic Sensor Network - ontologies
Owl ontology for SSN
http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/P.Barnaghi/ontology/sensordata.owl
nice poster about Semantic Support for Weather Sensor Data
http://cahsi.cs.utep.edu/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=9Hd8zmQNoZQ%3D&tabid=308
I did not mention this. NREL has a Semantic Wiki Project
http://en.openei.org/wiki/OpenEI:About#Introduction
http://vibe.nrel.gov/browse/tag_cloud#solar%20radiation
W3C list of Semantic Tools
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Tools
I did not mention "OBO" either. It is a biological ontology project, predating OWL, but can be translated into OWL.
Vast resource here. The foundation ontology is more than a bit controversial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Biomedical_Ontologies
Relation between OBO and OWL
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~hamid/oboowl.html
Very nice article summarizing "The Peril and Promise of the Semantic Web"
Http://knight.stanford.edu/news/2010/knight2.0/finlayson/
Website for one of the best commercial ontology editing tools. Free trial period for everything. A limited free version forever. Useful and good for the beginner.
http://topquadrant.com/products/TB_Composer.html
Website for Pellet - one of the best open source / commercial Reasoners (the Big Boys)
http://clarkparsia.com/pellet/
My own knowledge presentation site. Stay tuned for a new release soon