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Semantic Web:
Technologies and Applications for the Real-World

Time: Friday, May 11 (half-day, afternoon, 1:30pm to 5:00pm)

Location: Coleman

Abstract:

The Semantic Web has now reached a level of maturity that allows large enterprises to adopt the technology. The standards landscape is increasingly well developed, with RDF and OWL already being W3C standard recommendations, and GRDDL, SPARQL and SAWSDL looking likely to follow shortly. There is also an increasing array of roust software products that use Semantic Web technology, which greatly assists with any implementations.

This tutorial will focus on three areas. Firstly, it will provide a brief introduction to the core Semantic Web standards, including RDF, OWL, SPARQL and SAWSDL. It will then provide a comprehensive survey of the many Semantic Web tools that are currently available. The final section and the primary component of the tutorial will describe several real world implementations of applications enabled by the Semantic Web technologies.

Examples of real world implementations will focus on specific examples selected from the domains of life sciences, health care, GIS, government, technology, and financial services. They will describe the use of Semantic Web technology to support a number of key capabilities including data integration, search, and analysis. The presenters will describe why Semantic Web technology was chosen for the implementations, and the resulting benefits including empirical observations and analysis when available. They will also highlight some of the valuable lessons and development patterns that were learnt while working on Semantic Web implementations.

Prerequisite Knowledge:

Basic familiarity with Web technologies (including XML, RDF) and real interest in learning about open-source tools, commercial state of the art, and realworld applications in the Semantic Web. Exposure to real-world challenges in heterogeneous information integration, enterprise search, business intelligence, etc. is a plus.

Presenters:

Amit Sheth is an Educator, Researcher and Entrepreneur. From 1994 to 2006, he directed the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems (LSDIS) lab at University of Georgia where he is a professor of Computer Science. With 20 funded students and 6 faculty collaborators, LSDIS is one of the largest and most influential research groups in the area of Semantic Web worldwide. In August 1999, he founded Taalee, Inc., a VC funded company based on SW technology developed at the LSDIS lab. He managed Taalee as its CEO until June 2001. Following Taalee's acquisition/merger, he served as the CTO and co-founder of Voquette and Semagix, Inc. His research has led to several large commercial products as well as many open-source resources (ontologies, tools, and services) and deployed applications. Prior to joining UGA in 1994, he served in R&D groups at Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies), Unisys, and Honeywell. He is a W3C Advisory board member, a SAWSDL work group member, and a member of SW for HCLS interest group. He conceived (and developed in collaboration with IBM) the WSDL-S proposal which is the primary input for the upcoming candidate recommendation for SAWSDL. Starting January 2007, Prof. Sheth has been appointed to the position of LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar at the Wright State University. Professor Sheth is one of the most cited authors in Computer Science (with h-index of 44 and most cited publication in information integration with citation of over 1500), has published over 200 papers and articles, given over 200 invited talks and colloquia including 27 keynotes, (co)- organized/chaired over 25 international conferences/workshops, served on several company and international advisory boards, and served on over 110 program committees. He is on several journal editorial boards, is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, and a co-editor (with Ramesh Jain) for the Springer Book Series on Semantic Web and Beyond: Computing for Human Experience. For more information, see knoesis and Semagix.

Susie Stephens is now with Eli Lilly. Previously,she joined Oracle in 2002 to lead the development of the database, middleware and collaboration tools, to further enhance their capabilities as a powerful infrastructure platform and analytical engine for drug discovery and development. As such, she was heavily involved in providing support for RDF within the Oracle Database. She now guides Oracle in its continued adoption of Semantic Web technologies, and represents Oracle in discussions with W3C regarding standards in this area. Dr. Stephens is chair of W3C s Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group, and coordinates the BioRDF task within the W3C Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group. She has presented at a number of Semantic Web conferences that include Semantic Technologies 2006, and World Wide Web Conference 2006; and has written articles on the Semantic Web that have been published in IEEE Intelligent Systems and the Journal of Web Semantics. Dr. Stephens worked at Sun Microsystems for many years prior to joining Oracle, and now Eli Lilly.

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