1 / 45

Is The Semantic Web Ready for Business?

Information Systems Engineering Area Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Is The Semantic Web Ready for Business?. Eran Toch May 2005. Agenda. Why do we need it? What is it? Challenges and Opportunities Applications

keahi
Download Presentation

Is The Semantic Web Ready for Business?

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Information Systems Engineering Area Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Is The Semantic Web Ready for Business? Eran Toch May 2005

  2. Agenda • Why do we need it? • What is it? • Challenges and Opportunities • Applications • Current Commercial Activities • Semantic Web Services • Social Software • Summary

  3. The WWW Technically • A set of protocols and languages driven by a strong standards approach: • URI • HTTP • HTML • XML • Principles: • Implementation and platform independence crucial • World Wide Web Consortium the most prominent

  4. Problems with the WWW 65,900,000 results were returned Google - Market Cap:72.45 B $

  5. More Problems: Comparison Shopping Shopping.com - Market Cap:502.70 M $

  6. Building Shopping Comparison Engine

  7. Trust Spam Phishing E-Commerce Who can you trust to send you emails? Is this site is the one it claims to be? How can I know for sure if a transaction really occurred?

  8. Problem Domains • The General Web • Data-mining activities (e.g. search, comparison, notification) • Transactions (e-comm, e-gov) • Business Knowledge bases • Intranets, data warehouses • Collaborative Computing • Transaction between systems • Knowledge-based businesses • biology, law etc

  9. Agenda • Why do we need it? • What is it? • Challenges and Opportunities • Applications • Current Commercial Activities • Business Models • Social Software • Semantic Web Services • Summary

  10. The Semantic Web “The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” Sir Tim Berners-Lee [SciAme]

  11. Making the Web Machine-Friendly • Making knowledge self explainable for machines • Creating an environment for knowledge inference • Establishing trust

  12. Making it Meaningful for Machines <RDF> WWW Resource http://www.amazon.com/4344533 Humans Machines

  13. Knowledge For Machines is a RDF – ResourceDescription Framework Audio CD Soundrack itsType Product http://www.amazon.com/4344533 itsLabel hasPrice availability Universal hasTitle $14.99 24 hours Kissing Jessica Stein [REF]

  14. Ontologies Healthcare • An ontology is standard for some knowledge domain, e.g. • Healthcare • Bioinformatics • CRM • Web services • It provides a formal and agreed upon controlled vocabulary, which is used to define concepts • Information can be tagged according to these concepts Disease Is treated by Is a Product has Medicine Price prescribe takes Doctor treats Patient

  15. Web Ontology Language (OWL) • OWL is an RDF-based language for Ontology modeling. • Enable class and instance definition, using relations and properties such as: • Properties (price is a property of product) • subClassOf (Employee is subClassOf Person) • intersectionOf (music CD is intersectionOf playable thing and consumer product) • Cardinality constrains (product has 1 (and only 1) price properties) • OWL ontologies can be developed independently, having concepts reference each other

  16. Ontologies E-Commerce Healthcare supplies Supplier Disease has Is treated by Is a Product treats RFID Doctor Medicine has takes Price buys Patient Customer Is a

  17. Generalizing Knowledge Networks Product Price Comparison Robot Is a Price Medicine Side Effect Is a Is a Hospital Drug Monitor Robot Prescription OTC Medicine

  18. The Network Effect Library Is a E-Commerce Site E-Commerce Site Item E-Commerce Site Product Price Catalog ID Is a Personal Computer Song Path

  19. Agenda • Why do we need it? • What is it? • Challenges and Opportunities • Applications • Current Commercial Activities • Semantic Web Services • Social Software • Summary

  20. BP Reasoning Storing metadata(databases, messaging) Creating Metadata(editors, translators, automatic extraction, services) Business on the Semantic Web Business Processes

  21. Bottlenecks • Sufficient metadata is the main bottleneck of the Semantic Web • There is a loop: • Without metadata, no applications will be built • Without applications, no one will create metadata Commercial The Metadata gap Academic

  22. Metadata Chasm • Ontology creation requires companies and organization to standardize their concepts, much harder than to standardize communication protocols • Ontology creation requires large investments. Because ontologies reduce the uncertainty of information, their benefits will be revealed mainly in the long run. • Thus, they do not provide immediate return on the investment, not immediately [KIM]. • However, in some markets, ontologies may have faster cost-to-benefit cycle.

  23. Markets • Niece fields on the general WWW • Content syndication • Communications and social networks • Business Processes • Handling interoperability • Extending Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) • Knowledge-rich markets • Bioinformatics • Software Engineering • Law • Business Intelligence • Business intelligence using semantic annotations

  24. Agenda • Why do we need it? • What is it? • Challenges and Opportunities • Applications • Current Commercial Activities • Business Models • Social Software • Semantic Web Services • Summary

  25. Semantic Web Applications • Adobe - uses RDF as a basis for documenting meta-data, in PDF and other tools • Boeing – uses RDF and OWL in several internal projects • AGFA – uses RDF to categorize medical photos • NOKIA – lots of Semantic Web activities. Including RDF knowledge store • IBM – Strong research activities

  26. Aduna • Netherlands-based startup • Main products: • Semantic desktop search • Semantic enterprise search • Semantic Metadata server [ADUNA]

  27. Celcorp • Based in Santa-Monica • Claim to have 3 customers from Fortune 500 • Main business: Semantic EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) • Main product: Celware Intelligent Access • Records user actions in legacy systems • Builds an editable knowledge based of reusable task models • Generates executable processes, based on the tasks • Business processes are automatically planned and executed, using the knowledge base [CELCORP]

  28. Brandsoft • Based in Los Gatos, CA • Main product: Brandsoft Resource Manager • Content management and application development suite, based on RDF

  29. Cerebra • Based in Carlsbad, CA. AKA Network Inference. • Claim to have more than 25 customers, some of them from Fortune 500 • Cerebra Server – • Provides ontology management and storage • Semantic integration of data from RDBMS etc • Querying through XQuery • Cerebra Construct – • Ontology modeling using MS-Visio • Professional Services [CEREBRA]

  30. Tucana • Based in Reston, VA. • Their main product, Tucana Knowledge Discovery Suite, is a semantic knowledge base, with some business intelligence abilities. It is built upon: • Scaleable RDF triple store • Reasoning engine • Metadata extraction from RDBMS, files, emails, ERP etc. [Tucana]

  31. Semantic Web Services 2. Domain and Service models can be used to automatically or manually compose services 1. The customer’s agent automatically locates and invokes the brokerage firm’s Web service

  32. Semantic Web Services, cont’d • OWL-S is an upper ontology for a semantic description of Web services. • E.g. an input message can be typed as the concept “Product”, and not just a String • Describes a Web service by: • What it does (inputs, outputs, preconditions…) • How it works (a process model) • Grounding to an invocation method (WSDL) [OWL-S]

  33. Semantic SOA (Service Oriented Computing) Employee Signoff Report employeedaily activities Orderproduct Order Management Update inventory Check usersecurity profile check order status Customer Care Get incomingmessages Get customerHistory

  34. FOAF • Stands for "Friend Of A Friend“* • Provides a template for metadata about people, and their interests, relationships and activities • An open community-lead and open-source initiative [FOAF]

  35. FOAF Example Email Picture <Person> knows <Person> Website knows Name <Person>

  36. FOAF-Based Applications • FOAF Explorer: • More • Job search • Dating • Identity • Security [http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/explorer/]

  37. FOAF-Applications – cont’d FOAFNaut - <http://www.foafnaut.org/>

  38. Email Trust with FOAF [TRUST]

  39. Inferring Trust trust Email is blocked Email is accepted me trust trust email email trust trust trust Don’ttrust

  40. Agenda • Why do we need it? • What is it? • Challenges and Opportunities • Applications • Current Commercial Activities • Business Models • Social Software • Semantic Web Services • Summary

  41. Summary Academiadesert Widespread Use Where would the semantic web go

  42. Key Points for Success • Crossing the metadata chasm • Automatic extraction of metadata in predefined domains • Reducing the turn-on-investment cycle. Making ontologies useful, now • Niece markets • Bioinformatics • Software engineering • Business Processes • Leveraging semantic markup with Web services and enterprise computing

  43. Long Term Implications of a Success • New professions: • Ontology editors • Taggers • Agents • Many automated tasks (shopping, travel, dating…) • Bigger threats on human agents (travel agents, insurance agents…) • Business Processes • IT missions change - from constructing applications to providing frameworks • Work of operational personnel change – from requirement definitions to business process modeling

  44. References [SciAme] Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., Lassila, O., The Semantic Web, Scientific American, 284(5), 2001, pp. 34-43. [RDF] http://www.w3.org/RDF, http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/rdf [OWL] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-guide [KIM] Kim, Henry M. (2002). "Predicting How Ontologies for the Semantic Web Will Evolve", Communications of the ACM, Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 48-54. [FOAF] http://www.foaf-project.org/ [ADUNA] http://aduna.biz [CELCORP] http://www.celcorp.com [CEREBRA] http://cerebra.com [OWL-S] http://www.daml.org/services [TRUST] http://trust.mindswap.org

  45. Thank You erant@tx.technion.ac.il http://www.technion.ac.il/erant

More Related