San Diego Java User's Group

Speaker: Graham Matthews

Title: The Whats and Whys of the Semantic Web

Abstract: If you look up a definition of “the semantic web” you will most likely find an acronym soup of technologies (RDF, RDFS, OWL-Lite, OWL-DL, OWL-Full, SPARQL, SWRL, etc), whose purpose is to add “meaning” (i.e. semantics) to the data on the web so that machines can “understand” and “reason with” web content.

From such descriptions you might conclude that the semantic web has something to do with web pages, philosophy and artificial intelligence. You might even be skeptical, thinking that you have heard such promises of machine understanding before, that this is probably all hype.

While such impressions are partly valid (there is a lot of hype around the semantic web!), I hope to convince you in this presentation that the semantic web actually has something useful to offer, especially in the area of data management and organization. I will show in very practical terms what it means to “add meaning to data”, and hence what it means for machines to “understand” web content. I will also show how each of the various semantic technologies fulfills a specific and highly constrained role.

Finally, and most importantly, I will discuss how semantic technologies are a fundamentally different approach to data modeling, an approach that offers many advantages over the standard object oriented and relational approaches.

Bio:
Graham Matthews is the CEO of OrangeDog, a semantic applications and consulting startup specializing in the use of semantic technologies, notably OWL ontologies, to help clients interact with their data in ways that they understand, so that clients can transform their data into useful and usable information.

He received a M.S. degree in Computer Science from The University of Auckland, New Zealand, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Georgia. He has been active in the area of software development for over 25 years, working at Amgen to develop mathematical models and simulators to help biologists understand their experimental data, contributing to the development of the Magma computer algebra system at the University of Sydney, and writing a real-time wave-tide monitoring system for WaveRider Buoys.

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