Semantics: How Semantic Technologies are Tranforming Information Systems Semantic Arts, Inc. Dave McComb for Minneapolis DAMA January 18 th 2006

January 18, 2006© Semantic Arts, Inc 2005/ Objectives Semantics > Good Definitions Exotic Terminology Pursue this further

January 18, Semantic Web Semantic Technology Semantic Methodology, Design & Approach

January 18, Part 1: Intro, Concepts and Methods Part 2: Semantic Metadata and Annotated Data Part 3: Semantic Web Part 4: Demos

January 18, Semantic Concepts, Discipline and Methods Part 1: Intro, Concepts and Methods

January 18, Semantics The study of meaning (sometimes the study of the meaning of words)

January 18, 20067

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9 Structure and Metadata You can now deal with thousands, even millions of transactions, by knowing only a small amount of metadata

January 18, Drowning in Metadata Thousands -> millions of bits of metadata Meta metadata? XMI/MOF/ CWM Millions -> Billions of instances in hundreds of databases Commit to share ontologies to get back to thousands/ tens of thousands of concepts

January 18, Operative Semantics Some of these fields are “known” to the system and cause overt changes in behavior

January 18, Others are more subtle This one shows up on the detailed P&L reports This one shows up in the AP list of bills to pay This one shows up on the check

January 18, None of this is mentioned in the user manual or on line help text

January 18, Scale issues

January 18, Carver Mead

January 18, Flat Earth Schema We need to get up out of the weeds Higher level, business concepts

January 18, Part 2: Semantic Metadata and Annotated Data

January 18, Metadata and Annotated Data

January 18, Content: FOAF Friend Of A Friend Ontology for contacts

January 18, Content: Dublin Core

January 18, So, how do we do this?

January 18, Business Vocabulary Not whether, but –when: as you come across the terms, or up front? –what source: source documents, interviews or existing systems? –how: defining terms or concepts?

January 18, Business Vocabulary Schema Jargon

January 18, Injured workers -- representatives Information contained in the claim files and records of injured workers, under the provisions of this title, shall be deemed confidential and shall not be open to public inspection (other than to public employees in the performance of their official duties), but representatives of a claimant, be it an individual or an organization, may review a claim file or receive specific information therefore upon the presentation of the signed authorization of the claimant.

January 18, Employers -- Representatives Employers or their duly authorized representatives may review any files of their own injured workers in connection with any pending claims.

January 18, Claimant A claimant may review his or her claim file if the director determines, pursuant to criteria adopted by rule, that the review is in the claimant's interest.

January 18, Patient Except as otherwise provided by law, all treatment records shall remain confidential. Treatment records may be released only to the persons designated in this section, or to other persons designated in an informed written consent of the patient….[much more]

January 18, Child Victims Information revealing the identity of child victims of sexual assault who are under age eighteen is confidential and not subject to public disclosure. Identifying information means the child victim's name, address, location, photograph, and in cases in which the child victim is a relative or stepchild of the alleged perpetrator, identification of the relationship between the child and the alleged perpetrator.

January 18, Dilbert’s Boss Understands This

January 18, “How to” Sources –Documents –Existing systems –Controlled Vocabularies –Interviews Techniques –Distinctionary –Concept -> Term

January 18, Documents Information contained in the claim files and records of injured workers, under the provisions of this title, shall be deemed confidential and shall not be open to public inspection (other than to public employees in the performance of their official duties), but representatives of a claimant, be it an individual or an organization, may review a claim file or receive specific information therefore upon the presentation of the signed authorization of the claimant.

January 18, Existing systems

January 18, Vocabulary Item: “A variety of language unique to an individual” Idiolect

January 18, Every System We Design or Buy … … is another ideolect

January 18, Interviews Enumerate types Look for counter examples Look for similarities Synonyms

January 18, Warning: Definitions are hard to get consensus on And often not worth it

January 18, Example good Definition Customer: Groups or individuals who have a business relationship with the organization--those who receive and use or are directly affected by the products and services of the organization. Customers include direct recipients of products and services, internal customers who produce services and products for final recipients, and other organizations and entities that interact with an organization to produce products and services.

January 18, Another Problems with Definitions Homonym problem –Same lexical word means different things

January 18, SUMO and WordNet

January 18, Concept Avoids the generalized definition trap Drastically speeds up discovery (have you ever tried to get a group of experts to agree on the meaning of a set of terms) Finesses the homonymy problem Term or Terms

January 18, Process Tease apart the facets of a given definition. People will generally agree with the facets. They won’t necessarily agree on the same combination of facets mapping to the base word you started with. Ask: what could we call each bundle of facets that they care about? e.g., mother

January 18, Key Concept: The Distinctionary Is: a glossary Is distinct from other glossaries: structurally, each definition first specifies the more general type of thing the word is, and then provides a way to distinguish this thing from others that are similar.

January 18, Example Patient: A patient is a role between a human being and a healthcare delivery institution. It is different from other roles between a human and a healthcare delivery institution in that the human had been the recipient of the delivery of diagnostic or corrective health care services.

January 18, Taxonomies

January 18, Taxonomy “A taxonomy is a system for classifying and organizing large amounts of information” Seth Earley

January 18, DMOZ Home –Gardening –Personal Finance –Cooking Baking Casseroles Camping –Dutch Oven

January 18, Formal Taxonomy isa?

January 18, Subsumption v. Inheritance Dynamic v. Static

January 18, Ontology --Frame based

January 18, Ontology Definition “A specification of a conceptualization” Tom Gruber Taxonomy: Ontology :: Tree: Network

January 18,

January 18, Limits of Taxonomy Disjointedness

January 18, Concept: A Small Ontology GP (Genealogy Primitives) Person M/F Spouse Parent

January 18, Consider my family Database

January 18, What kinds of queries could I do? Any view qualified by the attributes –(show everyone born before 1/1/1990) Some join based queries –(show all of Dave’s children) But it gets much more complex after that

January 18, Committing to an Ontology Person Gender PersonSpouse

January 18, Concept: Committing and Sharing GP (Genealogy Primitives) GC (Genealogy Concepts) My Family Commits to Person M/F Spouse Parent Dave is male Dave is Addie’s parent Addie is female Naomi is Dave’s parent Naomi is Tom’s parent Father… Uncle… Cousin… Second Cousin, etc. … Key concept: queries/ inference can be executed using ontological definitions I’m not even aware of

January 18, Good Resource Ontology Development 101: A Guide to creating your first ontology Natalya Noy and Deborah McGuinness ontology-tutorial-noy-mcguinness.pdf

January 18, Description Logics

January 18, Description Logics This is where the rigor comes in. Three things that take some getting used to: –Classes and Instances interchangeable –Allowing the system to do some of the design work for you –Open world logic Plus some very strange terminology and symbology

January 18, Description Logics Points of Departure As much as possible, minimize the number of concepts that have to be accepted axiomatically. Emphasize formal definitions for all the rest.

January 18, DL Definitions

January 18, Classes and Instances Database designers make an early design decision as to what is going to be metadata (classes, columns, etc.) and what is going to be instance data. For ontologists, this is a continually moving target. Additionally, properties (which could be equivalent to attributes or relationships) are “free floating” and can be attached to classes, but don’t “belong” to them in the same way as with database models.

January 18, Allowing the System to Do some Design Declared Inferred

January 18, Open World In closed world (i.e., SQL), absence of information is assumed to be negation. If the query doesn’t find it, it doesn’t exist. In open world (DL), things are assumed to be possible until proven otherwise. In DL, classes are assumed to overlap unless they are explicitly declared to be disjoint. Domain and range are used for reasoning, not constraining.

January 18, Motherhood Sue is John’s biological mother Sarah is John’s biological mother Therefore? George Washington’s mother

January 18,

January 18, Other strange vocabulary DL TermEnglishDescriptionMeaning PartialNecessaryPrimitive, or defined classes If something is a member of this class then it is necessary to fulfill these conditions CompleteNecessary & Sufficient Derived or defined classes If something fulfills these conditions, then it is a member of this class TBoxTermsMetadataReasoning in the ontology ABoxAssertionsinstancesReasoning over the data

January 18, Content

January 18, Semantic Web

January 18, Essence at each level TCP/IPGlobal Physical Addressing DNS/URLGlobal Logical Addressing XMLUniversal Parsing XSDAllowable Structure RDFAssertions / Merging RDFSFrames / Classes OWLInference / Reasoning SWRLRule Execution March 2004

January 18, TCP / IP Single model for communication Globally unique physical addressing

January 18, DNS / URL Logical address need not = physical address Allows rehosting, migration, etc. DNS

January 18, XML Uniform parsing rules, tools, etc. Metadata (at least some of it) travels with the data. “DaVinci Code” “Dan Brown” “DaVinci Code” “Dan Brown” XML HTML/ XHTML

January 18, XSD Rules about allowable XML combinations Can verify XML validity Primarily for creating XML, not consuming it Comment describing your root element

January 18, RDF Resource Description Framework Subject/Predicate/Object “Triple” and “Triple Store” Make assertions Merge identities [proto truth]

January 18, “Triples” Subject Object Predicate A URI (URL) A URI (URL) or Literal Think instances Subject/Predicate/Object Dave McCombSem in Bus wrote

January 18, RDF Triples from a Database

January 18, RDF Triples from a Document Order2 “for winterfest”

January 18, Simple Merge

January 18, First Principles Two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

January 18, MER 1 & 2 and Spirit

January 18, Reification Each Assertion (statement) has its own URI and can therefore be the Object of another Assertion

January 18, Reification is Useful For Veracity Provenance Security

January 18, RDFS RDF Schema Meta Data for RDF Adds classes, properties, subclasses

January 18, RDFS adds Properties

January 18, RDFS Subtypes

January 18, OWL Web Ontology Language Comes in three flavors –OWL Lite –OWL DL (Description Logics) –OWL Full Adds Reasoning

January 18, OWL DL Necessary & sufficient

January 18, OWL DL

January 18, SWRL OWL + RuleML Adds more complex reasoning and the ability to execute action

January 18, SWRL If y is x’s parent, and z is y’s brother, then z is x’s uncle. parent(?x,?y) ^ brother(?y,?z) ^ uncle(?x,?z)

January 18, Tools That use this stack of standards

January 18, Tool: Protege

January 18, Tool: AeroText

January 18, Infrastructure

January 18, Infrastructure: Siderean

January 18, Infrastructure: Cerebra

January 18, Questions?

January 18, Re cap Semantics can dramatically reduce the complexity and increase the flexibility of your rule based (or non rule based) systems.

January 18, To pursue further Send an to me at For either a glossary of semantic terms or the “CIO’s Guide to Semantics” [I have a few bound copies] Visit our web site, many interesting free white papers Semantic Wiki Semantic Technology Conference

January 18, Resources – Books “Semantics in Business Systems,” print and audio “Semantic Web Primer” Grigoris Antoniou “The Semantic Web” Michael Daconta et al. “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things” George Lakoff

January 18, One last word

January 18, Semantic Arts, Inc.