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Semantic solution, a patent commercial success!!

Information services company Matrixware has teamed up with a consortium of European researchers to enhance access to its database of patents. The commercial deal points to a bright future for software designed to help organisations make the leap to semantic systems.

 

 

The agreement includes almost a million euros in funding for researchers at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and Bulgarian semantic technology company Ontotext to annotate patent information with semantic data and implement a semantic search engine to make existing patents faster to find and retrieve.

“The goal is to enable patent professionals to do their work more efficiently… Keeping track of patent information is a huge challenge because you’re dealing with terabytes of data and the number of patents is constantly growing,” explains Kalina Bontcheva, a senior researcher at the University of Sheffield.

The deal with Vienna-based Matrixware is one of several likely commercial implementations for the semantic knowledge and content management solutions developed by researchers in the EU-funded TAO project, which was coordinated by Bontcheva and involved seven partners in five countries.

“We’ve had a lot of interest and have been approached by several companies with a view to implementing our technology,” Bontcheva says.

The software developed in the TAO project is designed to address the demands of companies and organisations that have to deal with large amounts of data, be it patent information, website content or databases of manufacturing components.

Semantic data, which allows computers as well as humans to understand the meaning of text, images and other so-called data artefacts, makes information easier and faster to retrieve. But transitioning from legacy databases and applications, which often use obscure programming languages and complex structures, to semantic systems that require ontologies – vocabularies of related concepts used to assign machine-readable meaning to information – is far from a simple task.

 

Automating transitions from legacy systems

 

“Transitions from legacy systems to semantic ones can be performed manually, but it takes a lot of time and effort, and it is often impractical due to the sheer volume of data involved,” Bontcheva explains.

“In TAO, we created tools to automate much of the process, allowing organisations to reap the benefits of semantic systems in a much more cost-effective way.”

The approach requires implementing software that builds ontologies to describe products, services and processes within an organisation by learning from the descriptions, file locations and other information already contained in legacy systems and databases. Different data artefacts are then automatically categorised and annotated semantically, ready for rapid retrieval via a semantic search engine.

“For example, an aircraft door that in a legacy database probably just had a part number will now return information about its location, components, maintenance requirements, date of manufacture and so on,” Bontcheva notes.

That is the sort of structured and explicit information Dassault Aviation was seeking when the French aerospace group and TAO partner implemented the tools as part of the project. The company has since gone on to lead standardisation efforts within the aviation industry for plane and component maintenance data using the ontology developed in TAO as a basis.

“Manufacturers, who often have large databases of information on designs, components and products accessed by subsidiaries in different countries, are a key industry for semantic solutions. However, with more and more data being generated and stored by companies of all kinds, almost any business in any sector could benefit,” Bontcheva says.

 

Cost-effective boost to competitiveness

 

For that reason, the TAO project coordinator does not foresee companies cutting back on plans to adopt semantic information systems in the near future despite the global economic crisis. In fact, the economic problems could intensify the demand for semantic solutions from some industries, such as banking and financial services, that are facing increasing regulatory requirements.

“For others, despite the initial investment, it is a way to increase competitiveness and save money in the long term,” Bontcheva says.

The TAO tools, most of which are open source, could be used by almost any company with any kind of database and software requirements to transition to a semantic system. For example, the software has also been implemented by the company behind videolectures.net, a website dedicated to distributing recorded presentations.

“Because the software is open source, companies can implement it as they want. However, it is likely that they will turn to us to customise the tools to meet their specific needs,” Bontcheva says.

Though the TAO partners are not currently planning to launch a spinoff company as a result of their work, they have not ruled out setting one up in the future. In the meantime, they are actively seeking investment and business partners.

The TAO project received funding from the ICT strand of the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme for research.

 

 

The final TAO deliverables are now released !!

 

The TAO project showcase is now available!! Click here to access it.


The TAO project has now finished with the release of over 10 major public deliverables, software downloads and online demos. The case study prototypes are now completed (see D6.3 , D6.4, D7.3, D7.4). All TAO technology has been evaluated successfully (see D1.3.2, D2.3, D3.3, and D4.4). The final version of the TAO  infrastructure ( TAO Suite) and the accompanying methodology were also released (see D1.2.2, D5.3.2, and D5.4.2). The project has also produced a public showcase for interested companies and researchers.

 

 

TAO Industrial Workshop held on 27 January 2009 in Paris attracts strong industrial interest

 

TAO organised the TAO Industrial Workshop in La Defense, Paris, France on the 27th of January 2009. The workshop was very successful and attracted more than 40 attendees. The presentations concerned the SOA architecture roadmap, the TAO methodology, the TAO Suite and the use cases. These talks, presented by the TAO partners, raised very fruitful discussions as the attendees were industrial companies potentially interested by the TAO project outputs, it is to say the TAO Suite comprising of the Ontology Learning tools (OntoGen, Latino, RDBToOnto), the Content Augmentation Tools (GATE annotator and the CA Manager) and the Heterogeneous Knowledge Store.

 

Presentations are available online now! And you can also watch the presentations at the following address: http://videolectures.net/taoiw09_paris/


 

SWESE workshop at ISWC'08 a success!!

 

TAO sponsored the SWESE'08 workshop held in conjunction with ISWC'08 in Karlsruhe, Germany. The workshop was very successful and attracted more than 20 attendees who were all participating in a very fruitful discussions raised from the presented talks culminating with the panel discussion where many participants were concerned with the lack of the communication between software engineers and the semantic web experts - although there had been a great amount of work and usecases identified where ontologies are used in the software engineering, the take up in industry is still very slow. Many topics had been discussed from the invited talks covering Model-driven engineering and ontologies, and challenges faced by evaluating SWESE ideas and contributions within the software engineering lifecycle, to the paper and poster presentations covering wide range of topics where the ontologies are combined with the workflow support, enhanced access to the software artefacts, portal development, feature modeling, Eclipse Modeling Framework, and many
other interesting fields.

 

The workshop attracted 6 long papers, 4 short papers, 5 posters, 2 invited talks. TAO sponsored 2 students to attend the workshop. Proceedings are available online now!

 

TAO ESWC'08 tutorial now available to ">watch online

 

The TAO tutorial at ESWC'08 was very successful and attracted more than 25 attendees. It was run in an interactive fashion, encouraging audience participation. One interesting point raised was about the use of Semantic Web technologies within the larger field of Software Engineering, especially in terms of linking code with other external resources. For example, in the GATE use case, one could imagine and integrated refactoring process so that when one refactors a class, e,g, by changing the name of a member or method, then the associated configuration files would get refactored automatically. Generally speaking, the addition of explicit semantics to source code, e.g. by using Java 5 annotations, can be helpful in the development process, especially for large projects. June 2008. Watch it here, if you missed it!

 

TAO Video Tutorials: Available now!!

 

M30 Deliverables now available online at Public Deliverables page.

 

TO APPEAR SOON

 

Damljanovic, D. and Bontcheva, K. "Towards Enhanced Usability of Natural Language Interfaces to Knowledge Bases ", Special issue on Semantic Web and Web 2.0, Annals of Information systems, Springer, 2009. (To Appear).

 

Cerbah, F. "RDBToOnto : un logiciel dédié à l’apprentissage d’ontologies à partir de bases de données relationnelles", demonstration paper, Actes des neuvièmes Journées Francophones "Extraction et Gestion des Connaissances", Strasbourg, 2009. (To Appear). 

 

Amardeilh, F. and Damljanovic, D. "Du texte à la connaissance : annotation sémantique et peuplement d'ontologie appliqués à des artefacts logiciels", Conference Ingénierie des Connaissances 2009, 25-29 May, 2009. (To Appear).

 

 

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

 

Wang, Hai H. and Sun, Jing. "A semantic web environment for components", The Knowledge Engineering Review, Vol. 24:1, 1-17., 2009, Cambridge University Press, 24 (1), March, 2009. Link

 

Cerbah, F. "Fouille de données dans les bases relationnelles pour l’acquisition d’ontologies riches en hiérarchies de classes", Actes des neuvièmes Journées Francophones "Extraction et Gestion des Connaissances, ECG 2009, Strasbourg, January, 2009.

 

Cerbah, F. Mining the Content of Relational Databases to Learn Ontologies with deeper Taxonomies. 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT'08), Sydney, Australia, 9-12 December, 2008. PDF

 

Damljanovic, D. and Bontcheva, K. Enhanced Semantic Access to Software Artefacts. 4th International Workshop on Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering (SWESE'08), in collaboration with ISWC 2008, Karlsruhe, Germany, October, 2008.PDF

 

Martín, J. Spanish article “Migración de aplicaciones clásicas a aplicaciones semánticas” (Migration of legacy applications into semantic applications). Submitted to spanish magazine “Auditoría y seguridad”. (“Auditing and security” magazine), September 2008.

 

Cerbah, F. "Learning Highly Structured Semantic Repositories from Relational Databases - RDBtoOnto Tool", Proceedings of the 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008), Tenerife, Spain, Accepted - to be published in June, 2008. PDF

 

Bontcheva, K., Payne, T., Cerbah, F., Pan, J. "Transitioning Legacy Applications to Ontologies: A Hands-on Tutorial", 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008), Tenerife, Spain, June, 2008. Details.

 

Martín, J. Spanish article “Migración semi-automática de aplicaciones clásicas a aplicaciones semánticas” (Semi-automatic migration of legacy applications to semantic applications). Submitted to spanish magazine “Computer World”, June, 2008. Link

 

Tablan, V., Damljanovic, D. and Bontcheva, K. "A natural language query interface to structured information", In Proceedings of the 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008), Tenerife, Spain, June, 2008. PDF

 

BOOK CHAPTER: Amardeilh F. "Semantic Annotation & Ontology Population", In Semantic Web Engineering in the Knowledge Society, Cardoso Jorge and Lytras Miltiadis D. (Eds), Idea Group Reference, 2008. Abstract - PDF.

 

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Coordinator
Kalina Bontcheva
University of Sheffield UK