// JSON-LD for Wordpress Home, Articles and Author Pages. Written by Pete Wailes and Richard Baxter. // See: http://builtvisible.com/implementing-json-ld-wordpress/

Semantic Technology and Business Conference, East 2011 – Reflections

I had the pleasure of attending the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in Washington, DC last week.  I have a strong interest in semantic technology and its capabilities to enhance the way in which we leverage information systems.  There was a good selection of topics discussed by people with a variety of  backgrounds working in different verticals.

To begin the conference I attended the half day “Ontology 101” presented by Elisa Kendall and Deborah McGuinness.  They indicated that this presentation has been given at each semantic technology conference and the interest is still strong.  The implication being that new people continue to want to understand this art.

Their material was very useful and if you are someone looking to get a grounding in ontologies (what are they?  how do you go about creating them?) I recommend attending this session the next time it is offered.  Both leaders clearly have deep experience and expertise in this field.  Also, the discussion was not tied to a technology (e.g. RDF) so it was applicable regardless of underlying implementation details.

I wrapped up the first day with Richard Ordowich who discussed the process of reverse engineering semantics (meaning) from legacy data.  The goal of such projects being to achieve a data harmonization of information across the enterprise.

A point he stressed was that a business really needs to be ready to start such a journey.  This type of work is very hard and very time consuming.  It requires an enterprise wide discipline.  He suggests that before working with a company on such an initiative one should ask for examples of prior enterprise program success (e.g. something like BPM, SDLC).

Fundamentally, a project that seeks to harmonize the meaning of data across an enterprise requires organization readiness to go beyond project execution.  The enterprise must put effective governance in place to operate and maintain the resulting ontologies, taxonomies and metadata.

The full conference kicked off the following day.  One aspect that jumped out for me was that a lot of the presentations dealt with government-related projects.  This could have been a side-effect of the conference being held in Washington, DC but I think it is more indicative that spending in this technology is more heavily weighted to public rather than private industry.

Being government-centric I found any claims of “value” suspect.  A project can be valuable, or show value, without being cost effective.  Commercial businesses have gone bankrupt even though they delivered value to their customers.  More exposure of positive-ROI commercial projects will be important to help accelerate the adoption of these technologies.

Other than the financial aspect, the presentations were incredibly valuable in terms of presenting lessons learned, best practices and in-depth tool discussions.  I’ll highlight a few of the sessions and key thoughts that I believe will assist as we continue to apply semantic technology to business system challenges.

Marcel Jemio from the Department of the Treasury discussed a massive project seeking to apply semantics to their siloed transactional data.  His focus was to present his lessons learned as well as a possible blue print for similar projects.  He did a great job on both fronts.  A focus he suggested was that such projects should not be concerned with classifying data; rather they should seek to classify knowledge.  It is knowledge that is actionable and provides meaning and relevance.

Some other important points he made included the need for business data governance, standardized data (vocabulary, semantics) and a shared information repository.  Beyond his excellent sharing of experiences, his slides included recommendations for how to present information to business stakeholders so as to inform and educate.

Richard Green’s presentation looked at how to go about creating a practical ontology for an enterprise.  He dove into detail, showing some of the structured approaches that he uses to gather the requirements that feed an ontology design.  A key point for Richard was that ontologies must be practical (delivering value, being easy to use), define an ontology (describing what exists and their relationships) and work for a specific enterprise or constituent.

I thought his approach was very logical and included useful guidance for thinking through the process.  Sharing his documentation templates helped to clarify how the approach works and specifically how his “5 w’s” are applied to different situations.  I intend to integrate some of his approach into my practices.

Another presentation that contained specific guidance was Janet Millenson’s ROI of RDF discussion.  She outlined some of the key drivers that would lead an organization to apply RDF-based technology as a more efficient way to approach a business challenge.  She went beyond simple ROI and also discussed the underlying business driver such as reducing costs and supporting their mission.

Her approach to making the business case was standard procedure for introducing large scale change to an organization’s leadership.  Like Marcel, she cautioned against the use of technology terms in these types of discussions.  The technology is irrelevant to business leadership, the results are what matter.  Based on her experience she shared the importance of setting realistic expectations and creating the right team in order to succeed.

When discussing actual project planning and execution she gave a good overview of some major aspects that must be thought-through and managed in order to succeed.  These include people with their skills as well as technologies leveraged and the business domain being addressed.  Considering technology issues (data quality, governance), organizational concerns (build/buy, vendor relationships) and market risk (vendor consolidation, standards evolution) are vital in order to create the most effective result.

Her bottom line was that a successful project will address a specific problem in the organization (not boil the ocean), understand and work within constraints, start with realistic expectations and plan flexibility into the result to deal with technology and business changes.

David Booth (presenting on behalf of Jurgen Angele) walked through 2 healthcare industry case studies where semantic technology was used to effectively advance the effectiveness and safety of care while reducing costs.  The initial case was from the Cleveland Clinic.

The usual starting point of having multiple stovepipe systems that contained related data was presented.  The total data set, if combined in a meaningful way, would create a much more useful information source for doctors and researchers. Since semantic technology simplifies the integration of separate data sources, it was an obvious choice for this project.

David described the high-level process that was used to bring the data together.  The basic subsumption capability of inferencing is a simple yet powerful way to quickly combine data.  He quoted Jim Hendler, “A little inferencing goes a long way.”  The presentation described the pipeline process that was applied and which makes a lot of sense as a standard approach to dealing with such integration projects.

The second case study revolved around PanGenX, which seeks to use human genome information to understand which drugs will work for which individuals.  The overall data integration process was very similar to the first case study.  One point that was made, which resonated with me, was the statement that SPARQL is a convenient rule language.  This comment was in the context of simple rules, obviously not inferencing.  However if simple rules are being created, having them in the same syntax as the queries simplifies the process.

Neil Raden’s presentation, albeit abbreviated, was thought provoking.  Neil’s direct manner, devoid of pretense, allowed him to actually cover a lot of information in a very short time.  His take on the overhyped and overly complex processes that represent current BI practices, such as large MDM projects and monolithic data warehouses, was that these are not where businesses should be spending their BI dollars.

He dropped a lot of information in one-liners.  Some of which weren’t related to semantics as much as data in general.  I found his presentation a call to action to leverage semantic technology in support of a new data paradigm, not a new way to implement existing paradigms.  I don’t know if that was a point he intended to make but it seemed like a logical extension of what he was saying.

The conference wrapped up with a panel discussion between David Booth, Elisa Kendall, David McComb and Dennis Wisnosky.  They discussed some of the changes they have seen with semantic technology including the fact that project implementation seems to be getting easier as tools mature and the semantic technology ecosystem gets fleshed out.  They are also seeing people focusing on more pragmatic and meaningful projects, going beyond simply playing with the technology.

There was some discussion about the continuing hype associated with this area and the need to not fall prey to that.  The work that has been done represents hard work and collegiate sharing.  The solutions are neither turnkey nor ready to simply buy and install.

There continues to be a focus on unstructured data which is good since so much corporate information is sitting idle in documents rather than databases.

Some specific guidance for getting started with semantic technology: prove it to yourself with a POC.  You can’t discuss it more broadly if you don’t believe in it.  Choose an initiative and give it a name so that people recognize it.  Plan to deliver value on a regular (no less than every 6 months) basis.  Start small and grow from there.

Controlling scope, as in all projects, is central to working with new technology in order to get to a success point and begin acquiring lessons learned, which will allow for future success.  The guidance from “The Mythical Man Month” is still relevant: you always throw the first one away.

A theme that was heard in several sessions and repeated in the panel discussion was that use cases must be leveraged when beginning a semantic technology project.  In reality that has nothing to do with semantics.  I leverage use cases (or user stories) in every business system project.  The fact that they are required for semantic technology projects simply points out that these projects are still focused on business success and must be driven by business needs.

On the technology side there were several vendors present demonstrating their tools and providing sessions that explored their case studies.   The capabilities of these tools continue to advance quickly.  I saw several that I will be trying out including ontology editors, inference engines and integration tools.

It is great to see the tool landscape continuing to grow in breadth and depth.  It is also nice to see a mix of commercial and open source alternatives, allowing a company to start a small POC without a large capital investment and then having commercial alternatives based on needs.

Overall the conference presented useful experiential information through case studies and lessons learned.  More commercial experience needs to be shared.  Also, a way needs to be found to make the output and advancement that the working groups are driving more visible and understandable.

In my case I am not looking to build a triple store or an OWL interpreter, those types of standards are not interesting to me.  I need more basic information.  Some of this exists but may not be as visible as it could be.  There was discussion around the importance of raising the visibility of things like CIO-level information and developer (of semantic technology-based applications, not the semantic technology itself) documentation.

I continue to be convinced that semantic technology will fundamentally change the way we work with data and system integrations.  It is simply a matter of time to get there.  Practitioners and thought leaders have an important role to play in order to get this vision out into the mainstream and keep it in the forefront of enterprise system conversations.

As always, if you have thoughts you’d like to share about a topic on my blog, feel free to add a comment.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

2 Responses to “Semantic Technology and Business Conference, East 2011 – Reflections”

  1. Highlights from SemTechBiz DC - semanticweb.com Says:

    [...] David Read recently shared his reflections on the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in Washington DC earlier this month (the next SemTechBiz conference will be held in Berlin in February). Read writes, “To begin the conference I attended the half day “Ontology 101” presented by Elisa Kendall and Deborah McGuinness. They indicated that this presentation has been given at each semantic technology conference and the interest is still strong.  The implication being that new people continue to want to understand this art. Their material was very useful and if you are someone looking to get a grounding in ontologies (What are they?  How do you go about creating them?) I recommend attending this session the next time it is offered.  Both leaders clearly have deep experience and expertise in this field.  Also, the discussion was not tied to a technology (e.g. RDF) so it was applicable regardless of underlying implementation details.” [...]

  2. Highlights from SemTechBiz DC « Microformats & the semanantic web Says:

    [...] David Read recently shared his reflections on the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in Washington DC earlier this month (the next SemTechBiz conference will be held in Berlin in February). Read writes, “To begin the conference I attended the half day “Ontology 101” presented by Elisa Kendall and Deborah McGuinness. They indicated that this presentation has been given at each semantic technology conference and the interest is still strong.  The implication being that new people continue to want to understand this art. Their material was very useful and if you are someone looking to get a grounding in ontologies (What are they?  How do you go about creating them?) I recommend attending this session the next time it is offered.  Both leaders clearly have deep experience and expertise in this field.  Also, the discussion was not tied to a technology (e.g. RDF) so it was applicable regardless of underlying implementation details.” continued… [...]

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.