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

2. January 18, 2006© Semantic Arts, Inc 2005/2006.2 Objectives Semantics > Good Definitions Exotic Terminology Pursue this further

3. January 18, 20063 Semantic Web Semantic Technology Semantic Methodology, Design & Approach

4. January 18, 20064 Part 1: Intro, Concepts and Methods Part 2: Semantic Metadata and Annotated Data Part 3: Semantic Web Part 4: Demos

5. January 18, 20065 Semantic Concepts, Discipline and Methods Part 1: Intro, Concepts and Methods

6. January 18, 20066 Semantics The study of meaning (sometimes the study of the meaning of words)

7. January 18, 20067

8. 8

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

10. January 18, 200610 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

11. January 18, 200611 Operative Semantics Some of these fields are “known” to the system and cause overt changes in behavior

12. January 18, 200612 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

13. January 18, 200613 None of this is mentioned in the user manual or on line help text

14. January 18, 200614 Scale issues

15. January 18, 200615 Carver Mead

16. January 18, 200616 Flat Earth Schema We need to get up out of the weeds Higher level, business concepts

17. January 18, 200617 Part 2: Semantic Metadata and Annotated Data

18. January 18, 200618 Metadata and Annotated Data

19. January 18, 200619 Content: FOAF Friend Of A Friend Ontology for contacts

20. January 18, 200620 Content: Dublin Core

21. January 18, 200621 So, how do we do this?

22. January 18, 200622 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?

23. January 18, 200623 Business Vocabulary Schema Jargon

24. January 18, 200624 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.

25. January 18, 200625 Employers -- Representatives Employers or their duly authorized representatives may review any files of their own injured workers in connection with any pending claims.

26. January 18, 200626 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.

27. January 18, 200627 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]

28. January 18, 200628 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.

29. January 18, 200629 Dilbert’s Boss Understands This

30. January 18, 200630 “How to” Sources –Documents –Existing systems –Controlled Vocabularies –Interviews Techniques –Distinctionary –Concept -> Term

31. January 18, 200631 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.

32. January 18, 200632 Existing systems

33. January 18, 200633 Vocabulary Item: “A variety of language unique to an individual” Idiolect

34. January 18, 200634 Every System We Design or Buy … … is another ideolect

35. January 18, 200635 Interviews Enumerate types Look for counter examples Look for similarities Synonyms

36. January 18, 200636 Warning: Definitions are hard to get consensus on And often not worth it

37. January 18, 200637 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.

38. January 18, 200638 Another Problems with Definitions Homonym problem –Same lexical word means different things

39. January 18, 200639 SUMO and WordNet

40. January 18, 200640 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

41. January 18, 200641 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

42. January 18, 200642 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.

43. January 18, 200643 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.

44. January 18, 200644 Taxonomies

45. January 18, 200645 Taxonomy “A taxonomy is a system for classifying and organizing large amounts of information” Seth Earley www.earley.com

46. January 18, 200646 DMOZ Home –Gardening –Personal Finance –Cooking Baking Casseroles Camping –Dutch Oven

47. January 18, 200647 Formal Taxonomy isa?

48. January 18, 200648 Subsumption v. Inheritance Dynamic v. Static

49. January 18, 200649 Ontology --Frame based

50. January 18, 200650 Ontology Definition “A specification of a conceptualization” Tom Gruber Taxonomy: Ontology :: Tree: Network

51. January 18, 200651

52. January 18, 200652 Limits of Taxonomy Disjointedness

53. January 18, 200653 Concept: A Small Ontology GP (Genealogy Primitives) Person M/F Spouse Parent

54. January 18, 200654 Consider my family Database

55. January 18, 200655 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

56. January 18, 200656 Committing to an Ontology Person Gender PersonSpouse

57. January 18, 200657 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

58. January 18, 200658 Good Resource Ontology Development 101: A Guide to creating your first ontology Natalya Noy and Deborah McGuinness http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/ ontology-tutorial-noy-mcguinness.pdf

59. January 18, 200659 Description Logics

60. January 18, 200660 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

61. January 18, 200661 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.

62. January 18, 200662 DL Definitions

63. January 18, 200663 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.

64. January 18, 200664 Allowing the System to Do some Design Declared Inferred

65. January 18, 200665 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.

66. January 18, 200666 Motherhood Sue is John’s biological mother Sarah is John’s biological mother Therefore? George Washington’s mother

67. January 18, 200667

68. January 18, 200668 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

69. January 18, 200669 Content

70. January 18, 200670 Semantic Web

71. January 18, 200671 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

72. January 18, 200672 TCP / IP Single model for communication Globally unique physical addressing 216.239.37.99

73. January 18, 200673 DNS / URL Logical address need not = physical address Allows rehosting, migration, etc. www.google.com DNS 216.239.37.99

74. January 18, 200674 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

75. January 18, 200675 XSD Rules about allowable XML combinations Can verify XML validity Primarily for creating XML, not consuming it Comment describing your root element

76. January 18, 200676 RDF Resource Description Framework Subject/Predicate/Object “Triple” and “Triple Store” Make assertions Merge identities [proto truth]

77. January 18, 200677 “Triples” Subject Object Predicate A URI (URL) A URI (URL) or Literal Think instances Subject/Predicate/Object Dave McCombSem in Bus wrote

78. January 18, 200678 RDF Triples from a Database

79. January 18, 200679 RDF Triples from a Document Order2 “for winterfest”

80. January 18, 200680 Simple Merge

81. January 18, 200681 First Principles Two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

82. January 18, 200682 MER 1 & 2 and Spirit

83. January 18, 200683 Reification Each Assertion (statement) has its own URI and can therefore be the Object of another Assertion

84. January 18, 200684 Reification is Useful For Veracity Provenance Security

85. January 18, 200685 RDFS RDF Schema Meta Data for RDF Adds classes, properties, subclasses

86. January 18, 200686 RDFS adds Properties

87. January 18, 200687 RDFS Subtypes

88. January 18, 200688 OWL Web Ontology Language Comes in three flavors –OWL Lite –OWL DL (Description Logics) –OWL Full Adds Reasoning

89. January 18, 200689 OWL DL Necessary & sufficient

90. January 18, 200690 OWL DL

91. January 18, 200691 SWRL OWL + RuleML Adds more complex reasoning and the ability to execute action

92. January 18, 200692 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)

93. January 18, 200693 Tools That use this stack of standards

94. January 18, 200694 Tool: Protege

95. January 18, 200695 Tool: AeroText

96. January 18, 200696 Infrastructure

97. January 18, 200697 Infrastructure: Siderean

98. January 18, 200698 Infrastructure: Cerebra

99. January 18, 200699 Questions?

100. January 18, 2006100 Re cap Semantics can dramatically reduce the complexity and increase the flexibility of your rule based (or non rule based) systems.

101. January 18, 2006101 To pursue further Send an email to me at mccomb@semanticarts.com 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 www.semanticarts.com Semantic Wiki www.semanticwiki.com Semantic Technology Conference www.semantic-conference.com

102. January 18, 2006102 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

103. January 18, 2006103 One last word

104. January 18, 2006104 www.semanticarts.com Semantic Arts, Inc.