Tuesday, March 8, 2005
10:15 am - 11:05 am

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, national security, content management, and many more. Primary business value drives for such applications are content exploitation, regulation enforcement, knowledge discovery, and competitive advantage (from better insight or actionable information). These applications have the following core benefits:

• improve the value of content by automatically adding semantic metadata thereby improving contextual search and browsing,


• perform integration of heterogeneous data resulting in the ability to perform advanced analytics and knowledge discovery.

One approach to develop and deploy such applications includes integrating best of the breed tools. Another is to use a comprehensive semantic application development platform, which provides the ability to develop and manage large domain and application specific populated ontologies, create semantic annotations/metadata from heterogeneous (unstructured, semi-structured and structured) content sources, and provide complex query processing (both in form, such as taxonomic and path queries, and in its use of ontologies and metadata). In this talk, we introduce the first of such platforms - Semagix Freedom as well as provide case studies of its use in deployed applications (such as an application to support financial regulation as deployed in one of the world's largest bank group, and an application to support operational law enforcement).

Based on the observations and experiences gained from these enterprise class semantic applications, we also present technical requirements and capabilities of a semantic platform in such areas as expressiveness of ontology representation (and the relevance of W3C standards), ontology size and scale, ontology quality and freshness, automatic metadata extraction, semantic query processing.

Amit Sheth is CTO and co-founder of Semagix, Inc and a professor at The University of Georgia (UGA). He started the Large Scale Distributed Information lab at UGA in 1994, which is now one of the premier research centers in the area of semantic technologies and the Semantic Web. 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 two acquisition/merger of Taalee resulting in Semagix, he currently serves as its CTO. His research has led to three significant commercial products, several deployed applications, and nearly 200 publications. He has given 19 keynotes and over 150 invited talks/colloquia. He is the Editor in Chief of the International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, and on the board of several journals and technical committees.