Semantic Web and Databases

Research in search techniques was a critical component of the first generation of the Web, and has gone from academe to mainstream. Research and products supporting Semantic Search also look promising.

A second generation ”Semantic Web” is being realized in one form of a scalable ontology-driven information system, where semantic metadata allow software to associate meaning with heterogeneous content. This is enabling a fundamental shift in focus from documents and entities within documents to discovering and reasoning about relationships. And it will transform the hunt for documents that humans can examine or analyze into a more automated content analysis, resulting in actionable information and insights into heterogeneous content. In this talk, we juxtapose the following shifts, to paint the exciting new possibilities:

From documents and entities to relationships
From techniques that focus on either unstructured data (text) or structured content to both types and semi-structured data
From directly analyzing data to ontology based processes of creating high quality metadata and analyzing metadata
From search and browsing for delivering relevant documents and locating entities within contents to discovering complex relationships and delivering actionable information with insights; from semantic search to analytics and discovery-based semantic applications

This talk will interleave academic research with state-of-the-art commercial uses, including tools and real-world applications and experiences. The critical challenge in dealing with the Web scale of ontologies (with huge description base/assertion set), metadata (very large RDF graphs), and their analysis in discovering relationship will be discussed.

Key background material: Relationship at the Heart of Semantic Web, Semantic Associations (research), SCORE / Semantic Enhancement Engine (technology), Taalee Semantic Search, Semagix Freedom (product)