Business Ontologies and Semantic Technologies Class
Sunday, May 9th, 2010Last week I had the pleasure of attending Semantic Arts’ training class entitled, “Designing and Building Business Ontologies.” The course, led by Dave McComb and Simon Robe, provided an excellent introduction to semantic technologies and tools as well as coverage of ontological best practices. I thoroughly enjoyed the 4-day class and achieved my principle goals in attending; namely to understand the semantic web landscape, including technologies such as RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL, as well as the current state of tools and products in this space.
Both Dave and Simon have a deep understanding of this subject area. They also work with clients using this technology so they bring real-world examples of where the technology shines and where it has limitations. I recommend this class to anyone who is seeking to reach a baseline understanding of semantic technologies and ontology strategies.
Why am I so interested in semantic web technology? I am convinced that structuring information such that it can be consumed by systems, in ways more automated than current data storage and association techniques allow, is required in order to achieve any meaningful advancement in the field of information technology (IT). Whether wiring together web services or setting up ETL jobs to create data marts, too much IT energy is wasted on repeatedly integrating data sources; essentially manually wiring together related information in the absence of the computer being able to wire it together autonomously!