first industrial results of semantic technologies - claudio bergamini

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Introducing Semantic Web features in actual Enterprise scenarios

Claudio BergaminiGruppo Imola

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About us

• With over 20 years of expertise in enterprise IT consulting and skill transfer, Imola provides highly qualified enterprise strategists, architects and experts in Financial, Local Government and industrial sectors.

• We have a reputation of “Innovation Company”: we contributed to evangelize italian market in OO, RAD, Open Source Business Model, Corba, Java, UML, SOA, SCA, EDA and Semantic Technologies

• We are the authors of JBI4cics, JBI4corba, JBI4ejb adopted as standard components by Apache ServiceMix, by Sun Microsystem in NetBeans Enterprise, OpenEsb, Glassfish

• They will be adopted in Sun jCaps 6 in Jan, 2008.

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Imola Informatica in the Semantic Web

• Started in 2004

• We developed the MokaByte Semantic Web Portal starting from the SWED prototype (developed by HP Labs Bristol team for the SWAD Europe project).

• Sharing ideas with that team we integrated the infrastructure with a blog infrastucture.

• We adopted or designed MokaByte-oriented ontologies (DC, MokaByte tracks, Java classification, Profession role, Time)

• www.MokaByte-SWP.com was delivered in August 2006

• Actually we partecipate to a European Community research project with Semantic Web technologies funded by EC

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• MokaByte is an online community for enterprise Java architects and developers, providing daily news, tech talk interviews with key industry figures, design patterns, discussion forums, free online and real books, tutorials, articles and more.

• MokaByte was launched in May 1996 and has become the largest independent Java community in Italy (more than 30.000 subscribers to the monthly newsletter).

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• Sensible Logic S.r.l. is an academic spin off company born to industrially apply, develop and exploit the tremendous potential of the Semantic Web technologies and in particular of the research developed at the Semantic Web and Multimedia Group, Università Politecnica delle Marche.

• Sensible Logic is composed by leading researchers in the Semantic Web and Multimedia fields and is participated by Imola Informatica.

• SensibleLogic is the author of DBin, released in 2005, a general purpose Semantic Web application that enables power users (domain experts) to create "discussion groups" where users annotate any subject of interest

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Agenda

• Our experince in Enterprise IT adoption

• The Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0 hype opportunity

• Experienced areas of immediate interest

• Constraints and challenges

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Enterprise IT Semantic Technologies early adoption

We have 2 basic types of adoptions:

3. Special Purpose• Vertical applications in Health, Chemical, ..

4. General purpose• Non industry-specific, but targeted to the

general company or companies

I’ll speak about the second, the most interesting for intermediaries and innovative enterprises.

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Enterprise IT Semantic Technologies early adoption

With Enterprise IT customers we are experiencing the need of a mandatory approach :

Evolution, not Revolution

The successful adoptions –adoptions that happens-, satisfy this constraint and use the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 marketing hype as a tactical fuel.

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Enterprise IT Semantic Technologies early adoptionWeb 2.0

• RSS, Atom, …

– publish, describe, generate, search, aggregate

but

• Different data formats, text only search

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Enterprise IT Semantic Technologies early adoptionWeb 2.0• Tag e TagCloud

– bookmarks, classification, publish, search but• Same sintax, different Semantics• One meaning for me, different for you, for the company it

does not exist

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Web 2.0 helps to introduce Semantic Technologies

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Enterprise IT main areas of adoption

1. Intranet/Internet portals enhancement

3. Documents/Knowledge and Collaboration management enhancement

5. Services/Asset management enhancement

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Portals enhancements

Actual Portal Software lacks in:

Search: can be empowered with some level of Semantic Search, mediated SPARQL Search, SPARQL QBE, …

Navigation: can be empowered with Ontology-based faceted browsing

Classifications and Relations: can be empowered with Taxonomies and Ontogies adoption

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Portals enhancements examples

Oracle in Oracle Technical Network

Integration of different sources, data stored in RDF, SPARQL queries. Launched with great marketing hype as the new Semantic Portal in 2007

MokaByte-SWP

Integration of different sources, Ontology-supported navigation, filtering and search with mediated SPARQL, with blog integration for readers collaboration, launched in 2006

Enterprise business people pay general attention to enhance Search and Navigation

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Portals enhancements constraints

Pluggable architecture

companies recently invested great amounts of money in portal infrastructures, so they need actual solutions enhancements and not alternative solutions

Adaptability and no technologies lock-in

solutions must be capable to adhere to the customer’s Enterprise Architecture Framework:

– Technology: no mandatory technology

– Application: configurability

– Security: use corporate SSO system, profiling, policies

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Portals enhancements challenges

Metadata synchronization

between actual portals and ontologies

Metadata lifecycle management

for audit reasons

Enterprise Security Architecture and Tools integration

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Documents/Knowledge and Collaboration Management

Is helped by the Web 2.0-Enterprise 2.0 hype

Generally is applied to large bases of

• Documents or parts of documents

• References to documents

in many different formats

• Internet URLs

• (MS or Open) Office documents

• Wiki pages

• Blog posts and comments

• Files in Proprietary Repositories

• ………………..

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They have in common

• Documents and References can be rapresented within Dublin Core Ontology

• URI are inside and outside the company

• There are already in place applications and documents, so you must start from here with Ontology Construction

• Ontologies will evolve heavily

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Solutions adopted

• DBin for community management, manual creaton of metadata, plugin management

• RDF share with a Semantic Portal infrastructure for content visualization and navigation (built on top of SWED, developed in a EC research project)

• Using different tools for Ontology construction for the exixting content

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The challenges

• Find a way to start from the actual public/private Keywords, Tags, bookmarks (plugin for Web 2.0 sites ?)

• Find a way to match individual freedom and corporate goals (people use deli.cio.us bookmarks, but the corporate ontology is sinchronized accordingly)

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Web Services Management

The SOA hype

• Service Oriented Architecture trend is producian thousands of Web Services

• There is a demand for the help by Semantic technologies in WS annotation of service description.

• Help is needed in service discovery and combination.

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Web Services Management

The challenges

• Companies are introducing SOA infrastructure

• Actual infrastructures are proprietary, closed, and don’t use semantic technologies

• Integration with the actual repositories and IDEs is a hard work

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… Thank you, and ready for the discussion

Claudio [email protected]

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What part of the semantic web technologies are

ready

for the first general adoption?

Moderated discussion