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.”
Read continues, “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.”
Image: Courtesy SemTechBiz DC
