Proceedings

Abstract:

Before the World Wide Web, Information technology was dominated by smart applications working on dumb data. The ramifications of that philosophy are point-to-point communications, proprietary data with application lock-in, and stove-piped systems. XML is part of a larger trend to move the smarts out of the applications and into the data. The effects of this Copernican shift are application independence, cross-domain interoperability and application/information integration. The process of adding smarts to data involves climbing the smart data continuum. The end-state of the process is the same end-state of the semantic web: machine-processable data. This keynote will explore the stages of the smart data continuum, the technologies involved and the process of transitioning between stages.

The 3 R's of targeted semantics: Relevance, Relation and Reuse; describe core use cases that cannot be solved without semantic technologies. They are all capabilities that are matters of degree where the result is directly proportional to the data's granularity, fidelity, and expressiveness. In other words, simple or one-dimensional approaches will yield simple or one-dimensional results. Relevance is the intersection of a user's need with available resources. To achieve higher relevance involves capturing semantics at each point in the information value chain from producer to consumer. Relations between entities have been around since the 1970's but we still cannot seem to "connect the dots". Mr. Daconta will explore the advances in identity and predication that solve this problem. Lastly, Reuse provides a higher return on investment for content production. Semantics broaden reuse via entity extraction, categorization and the definition of knowledge objects.

Metadata and semantics cost. Semantic technologies do not offer a free-lunch. That is why the quest for "generally-applicable semantics" is greeted with healthy skepticism. This keynote will introduce the concept of "Targeted Semantics" that scopes the problem into two areas: semantic bootstrapping and salient semantics. Semantic bootstrapping is a set of mechanisms that provide "just-in-time" semantics for varying applications. Salient semantics involves discerning the minimal set of semantic annotations for a particular use case.

This keynote promises to instruct, entertain and illustrate all attendees. It will show you the road-ahead towards these new semantic technologies and how your organization can migrate to them.