Dr. Tim Finin View Slides
Dr. Dimitrios Georgakopoulos
Dr. Gilberto Fragoso View Slides
Finding knowledge, data and answers on the Semantic Web
Tim Finin
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
http://umbc.edu/~finin/Web search engines like Google have made us all smarter by providing ready access to the world's knowledge whenever we need to look up a fact, learn about a topic or evaluate opinions. The W3C's Semantic Web effort aims to make such knowledge more accessible to computer programs by publishing it in machine understandable form. As the volume of Semantic Web data grows, software agents will need their own search engines to help them find the relevant and trustworthy knowledge they need to perform their tasks. We will discuss the general issues underlying the indexing and retrieval of RDF-based information and the new Web-based paradigms they support. As an example, we will describe Swoogle, a crawler based search engine whose index contains information on Semantic Web ontologies, terms and data Applications that use Swoogle include TripleShop, which automatically build datasets appropriate for responding to user supplied queries and ELVIS (Ecosystem Location Visualization and Information System), a distributed platform for constructing end-to-end use cases that demonstrate the semantic web's utility for integrating scientific data.
The Use of Ontologies in Information Engineering for Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action
Dimitrios Georgakopoulos
Telcordia Technologies, Austin, Texas
The majority of today's software systems and organizational/business structures have been built on the foundation of solving problems via long term data collection, analysis, and systematic planning of solutions. However, this traditional approach of solving problems and building corresponding software and business processes, falls short in providing the necessary solutions needed to deal with many problems that require agility as the main ingredient of their solution. For example, such agility is needed in responding to an emergency, in military command control, physical security, price-based competition in business and investment in the stock market, video gaming, network monitoring and self-healing, diagnosis in emergency health care, and many other areas that are too numerous to list here. The concept of Observe, Orient, and Decide, and Act (OODA) loops is being viewed by the defense and business establishment as a guiding principal to provide solutions for many of these problem areas. However, there are currently few software systems that are being built to support OODA principles. In this talk we provide a tour in the state of the art of software systems that are specifically deigned to support OODA, and identify open research problems that need to be solved to develop OODA-based software systems. We discuss examples of OODA systems and application-specific ontologies that have been developed by Telcordia, and provide some short video demonstrations from the domains of video surveillance and emergency response.
Development of biomedical ontologies and tools for the semantic web
Gilberto Fragoso
NCI Center for Bioinformatics
The Enterprise Vocabulary Services (EVS) project of the NCI’s Center for Bioinformatics creates and distributes vocabulary products in support of the NCI and its partners. A major goal of the EVS is to facilitate interoperability between applications through shared semantics, and foster the utilization of the NCI Thesaurus by researchers outside the NCI investigating cancer related entities and processes, as well as other vocabularies suitable for specific domains. With the development of the Web Ontology Language (OWL), an integral technology of the Semantic Web, vocabulary developers can now leverage a mechanism for data re-use inherent to OWL and RDF/RDFS. To this end, the EVS began publishing OWL versions of the NCI Thesaurus, and funding the development of the OWLClasses plugin in the Protégé editing environment by Stanford Medical Informatics. Currently, we have begun work on a new terminology, BiomedGT, to further foster vocabulary re-use by the NCI and its partners and interested communities, funded further development of the Pellet reasoner by Clark and Parsia, and are integrating a Semantic Media Wiki into the development process of BiomedGT to facilitate collaborations with domain experts who are not necessarily familiar with DL or OWL.
