Conference Sessions by Day

Enterprise agility is ultimately measured by the ability of an enterprise to discover new markets, attain market leadership, and sustain attained leadership. The process is perpetual in nature and inextricably linked to an enterprise's ability to effectively identify, locate, and disseminate relevant data across its constituent domains. The Word Wide Web of (X)HTML Documents & Web Services (Web 1.0 and 2.0 respectively) have recently emerged as valuable tools for aiding MLD. Unfortunately, neither web interaction dimension has addressed the critical challenge of integrating heterogeneous data sources. It is this shortcoming that is addressed by the burgeoning Semantic Data Web via its ability to provide a conceptual view of heterogeneous data sources (databases, web services, documents etc.), the dexterous data model called RDF, and the new W3C Query Language called SPARQL. This session will cover issues, technologies, and approaches to platform-independent and standards-based conceptual views of heterogeneous logical data sources across the enterprise. In a nutshell, it will cover all issues relating to production and exploitation of enterprise linked data in front of or behind the corporate firewall. Attendees experienced with databases or XML will find that this session provides an introduction to newer technology that's a foundation for applying semantics for enterprise and web applications. Persons not grounded in semantics and Linked Data technologies will find this session is a valuable prerequisite for the sessions that follow.

SPEAKER: Kingsley Idehen , President and CEO, OpenLink Software Inc.

9:00am - 9:50am

Track: TERRACE BALLROOM | 9:00am - 9:50am

T1: How to efficiently publish and locate linked data: Semantic Web Sitemaps and Sindice API

With almost 30 million semantic web sources, the Sindice Semantic Web search engine is the comprehensive API and dataset available today to search the entire Linked Data Semantic Web. We will demonstrate the API, including the new, triple level, features and present simple examples of applications which can be created by interfacing to it. Also, we will illustrate how to craft a "Semantic Sitemap", a new proposed standard to efficiently large quantities of linked data for reuse by Semantic Web crawlers and clients alike. -- Query the Semantic Web of linked data Live from your applications. We'll show the value of it with high level examples and a demonstration. -- To publish Semantic Web data in a way which is both efficient and guarantees maximum precision and recall when harvested by clients or semantic web enabled Search Engines thanks to the Semantic Sitemap Extension.

SPEAKER: Dr. Giovanni Tummarello, Ph.D, DERI Galway

Track: GRAND BALLROOM | 9:00am - 9:50am

T2: Starting with SPARQL: making RDF shine

RDF data can be linked across the web. SPARQL is the standard way to query RDF. Through a series of examples, each key feature of the SPARQL language is explained. No RDF theory is required. Starting with a view of RDF as a table of data, this talk will show SPARQL as a simple pattern matching language that can be used to extract information out of RDF. From there, we show how to use SPARQL and inference. The audience will leave with a data centric view of RDF, and an understanding of what SPARQL can be used for.

SPEAKER: Dr. Andy Seaborne, Research Scientist, Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories

10:00am - 10:50am

Track: TERRACE BALLROOM | 10:00am - 10:50am

T3: Best Practice in Semantic Systems Development

This presentation explores the challenges and approaches for effective semantic systems development. We explore the ROI of semantic systems which are primarily based on agility, flexibility, and information quality. While best practices in traditional database-driven systems development life cycle (SDLC) may still be relevant to semantic systems development, there are important differences between them. We elaborate the success factors to consider with examples of different enterprise solutions: ecommerce site, social network analysis, semantic search engine, and risk management. The audience will walk away understanding the critical first steps and on-going management needed to deliver an enterprise semantic system.

SPEAKER: Dr. Rachel Yager, Director, Machintas, Inc.

Track: GRAND BALLROOM | 10:00am - 10:50am

T4: Linked Data: The Real Web 2.0

Linking Open Data (LOD) is a community initiative moving the Web from the idea of separated documents to a wide information space of data. The key principles of LOD are that it is simple, readily adaptable by Web developers, and complements many other popular Web trends. Linked, open data is the real substance of Web 2.0, and not flashy AJAX effects. Learn how to make your data more widely used by making its components easier to discover, more valuable, and easier for people to reuse—in ways you might not anticipate.

SPEAKER: Uche Ogbuji, Partner, Zepheira

11:00am - 11:50am

KEYNOTES | 11:00am - 11:50am

K2: Sponsor Keynote: The Semantic Web as a Blue Ocean Opportunity

The Semantic Web is ideally placed as a technology enabler in the coming connectivity disruption. This wave of disruption is being driven by powerful changes in networked social behaviour, the technology of Internet-scale applications and the economics of the ecosystems around them. The current teenage generation is growing up with the ubiquitous, always on, socially networked Web. As this generation enters higher education and the workplace, they take with them a radically different world view to the previous generation. They understand that we achieve more through sharing and collaboration than from being closed and isolated. At the same time, the World Wide Web is enabling a radical transformation from islands of content and data to densely interconnected information and data spaces, bringing huge value to those organisations with the scale and algorithms to exploit the value in the connections. Open source and the ubiquity of Internet connectivity are changing the economics of doing business enabling new collaborative models between organisations and individuals. Innovation networks and open business models are becoming a reality, requiring exchange and integration of unprecedented amounts of data, a key strength of Semantic Web technologies. This presentation will examine these trends and analyse the global commercial opportunity that the Semantic Web presents in the context of the evolution of the World Wide Web and Semantic Technology.

SPEAKER: Ian Davis, Chief Technology Officer and Director, Talis Group

12:00pm - 12:50pm

GENERAL SESSION | 12:00pm - 12:50pm

CONFERENCE LUNCHEON SPONSORED BY THOMSON REUTERS

1:00pm - 1:50pm

Track: TERRACE BALLROOM | 1:00pm - 1:50pm

T7: Building a Practical Semantic Framework: The role of taxonomies and controlled vocabularies in data integration

What if your sales organization spoke French, customer service English, and Product Development Italian? What is the likelihood of getting consistent answers, creating consolidated reports, and building applications that cut across processes? Unless you painstakingly translated terms to a common language, it wouldn’t be possible. In fact, you do speak different languages – different parts of the organization have terminology and jargon or their own conventions that make it difficult to integrate applications and search consistently. Learn how a number of global organizations have handled taxonomy issues on an enterprise basis, creating a common semantic framework as the foundation for integration.

SPEAKER: Seth Earley, President, Earley & Associates, Inc

Track: GRAND BALLROOM | 1:00pm - 1:50pm

T8: Linked Data Workshop

Based on questions submitted by the audience, a panel of Linked Data experts discuss architecture and system development issues surrounding Linked Data application development.

MODERATOR: Bob DuCharme , Solutions Architect and Author / Conference Chair, Innodata Isogen

PANELIST: Dr. Melliyal Annamalai, Principal Product Manager, Oracle

PANELIST: Michael Bergman, CEO, Zitgist LLC

PANELIST: Stefanos Damianakis, President & CEO, Netrics

PANELIST: Uche Ogbuji, Partner, Zepheira

PANELIST: Nikita Ogievetsky, Vice President, Morgan Stanley

PANELIST: Walter Perry, Managing Director, Fiduciary Automation

PANELIST: Dr. Andy Seaborne, Research Scientist, Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories

2:00pm - 2:50pm

Track: TERRACE BALLROOM | 2:00pm - 2:50pm

T9: TripBlox : Shared Travel Information, Microformats, Ideas and Intent

Tripblox is an initiative to use open standards with a travel twist to help publish, promote and aggregate trip ideas. During this presentation, the speakers will discuss the trip publishing standard, the OWL ontology that it feeds and the site created to search them. The speakers will also investigate some of the techniques used to encourage data structure in user submitted content and how they connections between trips, activities, hotels, and trip authors. This session provides a much-needed example of microformats applied to a vertical industry (travel).

SPEAKER: Taylor Cowan, Emerging Solutions Principal, Sabre Holdings

SPEAKER: Jay Fichialos, Director of Ideation and Experience, Travel Studios

Track: GRAND BALLROOM | 2:00pm - 2:50pm

T10: The Fellowship of the Web: The Two Towers

There are currently several different approaches to semantics and the Semantic Web floating around. While the uptake of these technologies is going extremely well, there is still confusion about what sort of technology fits where and how it works. The confusion is made worse because the term "ontology" is used in several different ways. In this talk, I will describe how these different sorts of models can be used to link data in different ways. I will particularly explore different kinds of Web applications, from Enterprise Data Integration to Web 3.0 startups, and the different kinds of techniques needed for these different approaches. In addition, some reflections on OWL and the current OWL Working Group are sure to arise.

SPEAKER: Dr. James A. Hendler, Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

3:00pm - 3:50pm

Track: TERRACE BALLROOM | 3:00pm - 3:50pm

T11: Semantic Discovery for Enterprises and Consumers using Service Oriented Architectures

Premise: As an increasing number of resources on the web (be they data, people, services, products...media) become semantically accessible. New services that retrieve and match resources with a high degree of relevancy become critically important. Moreover - the ability for such services to act as an agent and match on a continuous basis ensures results are always as current as possible. Agenda: The presentation will cover three applications of Semantic Discovery for the enterprise and the consumer and will outline how to take advantage of SOA / Web Service based frameworks for use within your organization/project. Walk Away: -Concepts of Semantic Discovery and the benefit to business and consumer -How to technically integrate Semantic Discovery services into your business -How to sell through Semantic Discovery services to clients

SPEAKER: Marcus Trevisani, CTO, Relevant Digital

Track: GRAND BALLROOM | 3:00pm - 3:50pm

T12: Enabling Semantic Applications Through Calais

The promise of the Semantic Web is in shielding the user from the Data Access problem. A necessary condition to fulfill this promise is data and content interoperability. We all want to make all the world's content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Whether you call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web, Reuters piece of it is called Calais. Reuters' Calais Web service (available from OpenCalais.com) automates semantic metadata generation, incorporates user-developed metadata, transports metadata throughout the content ecosystem and extends it by allowing users to build new metadata generation capabilities.

SPEAKER: Barak Pridor, CEO, Reuters ClearForest

4:00pm - 5:00pm

GENERAL SESSION | 4:00pm - 5:00pm

NETWORKING POWER HOUR

5:00pm - 5:45pm

KEYNOTES | 5:00pm - 5:45pm

K3: Web of Data

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), will deliver the LinkedData Planet Keynote address.

SPEAKER: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

6:30pm - 7:20pm

GENERAL SESSION | 6:30pm - 7:20pm

X1: Special Event: NY XML SIG Meeting - Semantic Web Glasses Framework

Semantic Web Glasses Framework brings information silos together and enables leveraging wider spectrum of information representations. For example, it can on-the-fly normalize various RSS standards and dialects or translate between TopicMaps, RDF and XML Schemas. We will demonstrate how information expressed in RDF or TopicMaps can be seen as an importable XML Schema, and how RSS Semantic Glasses can help feed readers and aggregators consume various metadata about web resources. Machinery enabling on-the-fly translation and normalization from various XML representations requires just a few lines of Java/C# code. We will present the code and a sample XSLT library.

SPEAKER: Nikita Ogievetsky, Vice President, Morgan Stanley

7:20pm - 7:30pm

GENERAL SESSION | 7:20pm - 7:30pm

X3: Special Event: NY XML SIG Meeting - Break

7:30pm - 8:20pm

GENERAL SESSION | 7:30pm - 8:20pm

X2: Special Event: NY XML SIG Meeting - Semantic (not syntactic) tools for versioning and for data integration

Data versioning problems (see e.g. recent xml-dev thread http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200712/threads.html#00044 ) have outgrown syntactic (essentially tree-walking diff) solutions. Likewise, there are more and more sophisticated data integration problems where there is no workable syntactic mapping between the domains to be integrated, nor between each of them and some syntactically-described superset--the traditional approach to solving these problems. What seems to be required is a common process to elaborate semantics from the syntactic data of each domain, so that comparisons might then be done on the resulting semantic outcomes, rather than on the underlying raw syntax. Genetic mapping presented a similar problem--variant syntactic sequences yielding similar or congruent semantic outcomes--and the mapping techniques now routinely employed in genetics seem to have direct application to the data management problems of mapping between versions and mapping diverse data domains through the similarities of their semantic outcomes, rather than through their discouragingly disjoint syntax and their non-congruent granularities.

SPEAKER: Walter Perry, Managing Director, Fiduciary Automation

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18

8:00am - 8:10am

GENERAL SESSION | 8:00am - 8:10am

G2: Welcome, Announcements and Introductions

Conference Co-Chair Bob DuCharme opens day two of LinkedData Planet.

SPEAKER: Bob DuCharme , Solutions Architect and Author / Conference Chair, Innodata Isogen

8:10am - 8:50am

KEYNOTES | 8:10am - 8:50am

K4: Sponsor Keynote: Scalable Semantics User's Guide

SPEAKER: Atanas Kiryakov, Head, Ontotext Lab (Sirma Group)

9:00am - 9:50am

Track: TERRACE BALLROOM | 9:00am - 9:50am

W1: DITA, Semantics, Content Management, Dynamic Documents and Linked Data - A Marriage Made in Heaven?

DITA was conceived as a model for improving reuse through topic-oriented modularization of content. Instead of creating new content or copying and pasting information which may or may not be current and authoritative, organizations manage a repository of content assets – or DITA topics – that can be centrally managed, maintained and reused across the enterprise. This helps to accelerate the creation and maintenance of documents and other deliverables and to ensure the quality and consistency of the content organizations publish. But the next frontier of DITA adoption is leveraging semantic technologies—taxonomies, ontologies and text analytics—to automate the delivery of targeted content. For example, a service incident from a customer is automatically matched with the appropriate response, which is authored and managed as a DITA topic. Join this session and learn how organizations can leverage DITA, semantics, content management, dynamic documents, and linked data to fully utilize the value of their information.

SPEAKER: Jeffrey Deskins, Principal Consultant, JustSystems

SPEAKER: Amber Swope, Principal Consultant, JustSystems

Track: GRAND BALLROOM | 9:00am - 9:50am

W2: From DBpedia to OntoWiki - Emergent Data and Semantics from Social Collaboration

Large data and knowledge bases are increasingly often created through collaboration within online communities. In the light of the example applications DBpedia and OntoWiki we present technologies enabling and exploiting such emergent semantic representations. DBpedia is a knowledge base containing a structured, semantic representation of data, information and knowledge from Wikipedia. It is the largest linked data base available today and facilitates a variety of application and usage scenarios ranging from intelligent search to novel visualization techniques. OntoWiki is a tool providing support for adaptive, distributed knowledge engineering scenarios. It facilitates the visual presentation of a knowledge base as an information map and enables intuitive authoring of semantic content, with an inline editing mode for editing LinkedData content, similar to WYSIWYG for text documents. It fosters social collaboration aspects by keeping track of changes, allowing to comment and discuss every single part of a knowledge base, enabling to rate and measure the popularity of content and honoring the activity of users. Ontowiki enhances the browsing and retrieval by offering semantic enhanced search strategies. All these techniques are applied with the ultimate goal of decreasing the entrance barrier for projects and domain experts to collaborate using semantic technologies.

SPEAKER: Dr. Sören Auer, Researcher and Author, University of Pennsylvania

10:00am - 10:50am

Track: TERRACE BALLROOM | 10:00am - 10:50am

W3: Using Machine Learning to Discover and Understand Structured and Unstructured Data

Structure data is ubiquitous on the web, but it is often disguised as semi-structured web sites - i.e., web sites that people can immediately perceive as containing structured data, but computers cannot readily interpret. However, modern machine learning methods can pierce this disguise and extract structured data from the web and otehr sources. Furthermore, the data thus extracted is accurate enough to support many interesting data-mining operations, including structured queries, collaborative recommendation, classification, and set expansion. I will discuss the history and current state-of-the-art of machine learning for data extraction and information integration, and some of the practical implications of this technology.

SPEAKER: Dr. William Cohen, Associate Research Professor, Carnegie Mellon University Machine Learning Department

Track: GRAND BALLROOM | 10:00am - 10:50am

W4: Integrating Relational Data Into the Semantic Web

Invaluable data is stored in relational databases, but a growing fraction is being created in non-traditional forms such as spreadsheets and PDF files. Integrating relational and XML data is well-understood with widely-accepted solutions. Relational data must be similarly integrated with data in other forms. A promising approach is to translate the underlying data into a common format (such as RDF) and the creation of a "semantic cover" atop the data in the form of an ontology (perhaps using OWL). Classes and subclasses of the ontology are mapped into queries on the underlying data. The ontology can then be queried using SPARQL and the SPARQL queries translated to queries on the underlying data.

SPEAKER: Dr. Ashok Malhotra, Standards Architect, Oracle

SPEAKER: Jim Melton, Standards Maven, Oracle USA

11:00am - 11:50am

KEYNOTES | 11:00am - 11:50am

K5: Keynote: Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and Information Management

Dr. Anant Jhingran of IBM will discuss how semantic technologies and linked data serve the information needs of Web 2.0/3.0 and Enterprise 2.0 applications.

SPEAKER: Dr. Anant Jhingran, VP and CTO, Information Management Division, IBM

12:00pm - 1:00pm

GENERAL SESSION | 12:00pm - 1:00pm

LUNCH IN EXHIBIT AREA

1:00pm - 1:50pm

Track: TERRACE BALLROOM | 1:00pm - 1:50pm

W7: Improved Services Through Behavior and Activity Recognition

Web 3.0 envisages software agents that know how to reason over activities, events, locations, people, companies, and their inter-relationships. Learning more about customers through behavioral and activity recognition is here today through currently available Semantic Technologies and is a showcase for how these technologies will evolve. Our presentation will demonstrate real world examples of activity recognition using a combination of industry standard RDF and OWL, reasoning with basic Geotemporal primitives and some well-known Social Network Analytics.

SPEAKER: Dr. Jans Aasman, CEO, Franz Inc.

Track: GRAND BALLROOM | 1:00pm - 1:50pm

W8: Applying Semantic Web Technologies to Enterprise Solutions

While W3C Semantic Web standards specify core technical underpinnings of semantic web technology, they do not address key deployment issues that arise from requirements and concerns such as scalability, versioning, ownership and legacy integration. We will outline core challenges that reflect the state-of-the-art in applying semantic web technology to develop enterprise solutions. Finding effective resolutions to these issues is essential to successful enterprise deployments. To that end, we will frame some of the options and tradeoffs for addressing common solution deployment challenges given the current maturity state of available products. These choices have significant implications on the ontology modeling approaches, architectural design and technology configurations of the solution. Drawing on our experience in a number of large scale implementations, we will present promising architectural patterns and discuss their applicability in different business and technical contexts.

SPEAKER: Dean Allemang , Chief Scientist, TopQuadrant Inc.

SPEAKER: Irene Polikoff, Executive Partner, TopQuadrant Inc.

2:00pm - 2:50pm

Track: TERRACE BALLROOM | 2:00pm - 2:50pm

W9: Leveraging Semantic Technology for Infrastructure Mediation

This technical presentation examines in detail how semantic technology is being applied to optimize Machine-to-Machine Intelligence for large scale distributed computing networks. The session will be of interest to participants wishing to see detailed case study information on how this technology is emerging in the "Application Program Management" and thus infrastructure mediation space. The first way of Semantic technology focussed on Search and Interoperability, with over 5 years experience is developing such solutions, the presenter fuses advanced artificial intelligence with semantic technology - via a live demonstration.

SPEAKER: Geoff Brown, CEO, m2mi Corporation

Track: GRAND BALLROOM | 2:00pm - 2:50pm

W10: How to Publish Linked Data on the Web

So you want to publish Linked Data on the Web? This session, based on the primary tutorial resource for Linked Data publishers, will tell you how. The talk will outline the principles of Linked Data and highlight issues that must be considered by you as a data publisher. Best practices will be presented in areas such as how to choose good URIs for your resources, which vocabularies to use to describe your data, and how to link your data set to others on the Web. You can expect to leave the session with a broad understanding of the design decisions involved in publishing Linked Data.

SPEAKER: Tom Heath, Researcher, Talis Information Ltd

3:00pm - 3:50pm

Track: TERRACE BALLROOM | 3:00pm - 3:50pm

W11: The Social Internet, Promise or Plague in Education?

The Social Internet has spawned numerous networks silos with data that is isolated from traditional search mechanisms. How will all of this new data being generated in these silos be accessed? When, if ever, is it appropriate to connect with the data and profiles in these silos? Education is a great arena to explore when thinking about bridging privacy needs with the benefits of data connectivity and collaboration provided by social networking. Can social networking keep students profiles protected, enhance student performance and facilitate professional development with social networking? This talk will cover the benefits of and technology best practices for collaborative educational environments and data connectivity in education.

SPEAKER: Rebecca Dias, VP of Software Development, SynapticMash

Track: GRAND BALLROOM | 3:00pm - 3:50pm

W12: Semantic Technology in the Real World: Challenges and Opportunities

Moving from a web of linked documents to a web of linked data presents opportunities and challenges. A panel of CEOs and experts will discuss the challenges and opportunities, as well as practical applications of semantic technologies for web and enterprise computing.

MODERATOR: Ken North, President, Ken North Computing LLC

PANELIST: Geoff Brown, CEO, m2mi Corporation

PANELIST: Kingsley Idehen , President and CEO, OpenLink Software Inc.

PANELIST: Dr. Anant Jhingran, VP and CTO, Information Management Division, IBM

PANELIST: Eghosa Omoigui, Director, Strategic Investments, Consumer Internet & Semantic Technologies, Intel Capital

PANELIST: Robert Shimp, Vice President Global Technology Business Unit, Oracle

PANELIST: Alex Spinelli, Chief Technical Officer, Reuters News