It’s that time of the year again when the semantic community congregate in San Francisco to spend a week sharing all the great stuff they’ve been doing for the last year. Not one to want to miss out on the action, I will be joining the event this year to share some of my own work on social semantic analysis. But the purpose of this blog post isn’t to blab about my own presentation, much as I love talking about myself :-)
As I was reviewing the event schedule and planning my week, I figured my analysis might be useful to other like-minded folks. So if you are interested in social business and specifically analytics, then this is how you might fancy spending your time at the Semantic Tech & Biz Conference, San Francisco, June 3-7. And because there’s quite a lot to cover, I am going to post my review in a couple of installments as I review the conference schedule over the next week.
Monday June 3rd… is all about “Understanding the Business”
To build any analytics bizapp the first step is always domain modelling, where we map out the vocabularies that describe the business, how they relate to each other and the business processes, and how they are applied within the business context. There is no exception to this rule despite what some folks might claim. Maths doesn’t cure world hunger! The better the understanding of the business semantics, the more intelligent the insights that get derived from the maths. It’s not about trying to build the ontology of everything (clearly impossible), however we do need to establish the core model and a system that allows the business — people and algorithms — extend it over time (particularly interesting in the social context). A smart solution will never work the people out of the system. Kind of obvious I know, but you’d be surprised… :-)
- The day starts with TopQuadrant’s tutorial on “SKOS for Business Vocabulary Management” @ 08:30 – 11:45, Franciscan A.
- In the afternoon the theme continues with a tutorial on “Ontology 101: An Introduction to Knowledge Representation and Ontology Development” @ 13:15 PM – 16:30, Imperial B, with Deborah L McGuinness (@dlmcguinness) and Elisa Kendall.
- Then finishes up with the Lightening Presentations @ 17:00 – 18:00, Imperial A which are always interesting. The ones that specifically pique my interest are:
- From Semantic Graph to Rich Reading Path, where Tim McCormick (@mccormicktim) of HighWire Press explores how the semantic graph can improve reader experience. I have a particular affinity for this subject because the potential of semtech to improve how we organize, navigate, and interact with content. And since “social” signficantly increases the volume and variety of content (Is “Social” further exacerbating information overload?) passing across our desks, or more frequently our mobile devices, we need all the help we can get.
- Anzo Unstructured: Linking Text With Data In Less Than Five Minutes, where Lee Feigenbaum (@LeeFeigenbaum) of Cambridge Semantics talks about their Anzo technology which supports integration of BI into BizApps. Deeply integrating social analytics into bizapps is one of my favorite topics these days (see Social Analytics is more than just Social Media…), where my own semtech prez touches on this subject, so I am curious to see what Anzo offers.
- Data Integration with Semantic Wikis, where Michael Erdmann of Ontoprise shows semantic wikis as an integration platform and mechanism for sharing and semantically enhancing structured data across the enterprise. Being in the social space its all about sharing and social analytics is all about being able to infer some insights from the sharing process. Therefore anything that helps make the sharing process more semantically unambiguous is very interesting. Lets see what Ontoprise have to say on this topic.
Marie's Ramblings & Ruminations 
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