Kaizen Bits

Today El Pais, the Spanish top newspaper published an article about SONAR (indra-y-varias-universidades-desarrollan-un-buscador-financiero), about flagship project with Indra Software Labs, the University of Murcia and the Instituto de Empresa.

The project started in 2007 and it was originally intended as a key attempt to provide a fully-fledged semantic based application for a particular domain. Since its inception, SONAR suffered the rise of Google Finance, which overlapped its functionality (hence showing us we were on the right track) and fortunately derived also into SONAR2, a project we are still working on, based on SONAR from the information management perspective but extending its scope to decision support systems, chartist analysis and fundamental analysis.

I am very happy about the results of the project and from here I would like to congratulate all who contributed in its success.

I was at the WEBIST09 in Lisbon and I´ve got a couple of things to say. Apart from Dieter Fensel (who was my former boss and also I had to pleasure to spend some time with) keynote, I did not see much of semantics. Actually, I was there to present our MEDFINDER paper  and it was only in that very session where similar approaches were presented. Particularly, we got quite a lot of feeback, summarized as follows:

1- There was quite a lot of feedback and energy about the paper. People understood its use and potential, the feeling was very good.

2- Question 1: Why not create a Pain Ontology bridging from the Symptoms to the Diseases?

3- Question  2: Why not having a twitter-like interface? Patients could already be addressed before entering the hospital

4- Question 3: In France, before going to a specialist you must address a general doctor first. Is it not this the role of ODDX / MEDFINDER?
In a nutshell, the conference was good, but for being a conference about Web Information Systems, I think that Semantic Technologies lost some stream.

I was interviewed after my talk at the University of Murcia. We talked about Web 3.0, Cloud Computing and and this is the article finally published in Europa Press with excerpts of our conversation.

Enjoy!!

After all the buzz about the financial crisis, I got to hear about a couple of investments in so-called “semantic companies” or projects. First, it was the purchase of Powerset by Microsoft, what shows the interest of the software colossus, specially now that they will open three major research centers in Europe about “Search”.

Secondly, Independent News and Media signing an agreement with Canadian firm Nstein to semantically tag and organise its entire library of media assets.

This might not mean too much, since I think Semantics are still far beyond the meeting point with industry but it is always a good step to get to know about.

I just got this email I wanted to share:
“Microsoft, the software giant flush with billions of dollars in its warchest, has agreed to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset, we’ve learned.  The purchase price is rumored to be slightly more than $100 million. An announcement is expected next month.  Powerset, of San Francisco, has developed a technology that attempts to understand the full meanings of phrases you type in while searching, and it returns results based on that understanding.

By buying Powerset, Microsoft is hoping to close the perceived quality gap with Google’s search engine. The move comes as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer continues to argue that improving search is Microsoft’s most important task. Microsoft’s market share in search has steadily declined, dropping further and further behind first-place Google and second place Yahoo”.

Powerset has been classified as a “semantic” company for many (particularly I read it in the Spanish technical press) and avoided under that term by many other, so I am not sure if it is very correct to describe it as a semantic company. It is though, the underlying search engine of Wikipedia!!

We got one paper accepted from our cooperation with the folks at UniK, Capturing Semantics for Information Security and Privacy Assurance, published in Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. I hereby enclose the abstract:

Security and privacy assurance is indispensable for ubiquitous access to information and resources. This paper focuses on the security and privacy provisions in a restricted organizational environment through access control mechanism. It includes the representation of the semantics of an organization and its access control mechanism exploiting the Web Ontology Language. The system controls access to the resources of an organization through differential access privileges. These are formulated based on the roles of the individuals, and the projects and departments they belong to. Instead of explicit definitions, some additional facts of the mechanism are inferred by executing semantic rules using the Jess rule engine over the designed ontology. These information are then passed back to the ontology to enrich it. The ontology is designed to cope with the organization restructuring with minimal efforts. 

Same as last year, I was lecturing at the Master de Ingeniería de la Web at the Universidad de Oviedo. I appreciated very much that Labra invited me again.

I had a terrific time and introduced a number of changes from last year, particularly I talked about new stuff such as Cloud Computing and the ever-growing possibilities of service computing, things I have already blogged about.

Yes, the picture is not from Oviedo, despite I love Asturias, I had no time to take a picture…

Currently, we are working on a Semantic Datawarehouse will-be-a-project. Coming from a different angle from what was our work on building up integration among Information Systems, the idea of this SEDA (codename) approach is to prove that we can do something in the last stack of a datawarehouse system: the metadata repository.

In a nutshell, a datawarehouse is composed by four layers, namely, from the database to the outside world: a persistence layer, a data access layer, a functional layer and a metadata repository, which builds up an integrated directory of the various databases integrated through the datawarehouse. In datawarehouses, you could have a local as view or a global as view integration.

I hope this project can evolve further and make some clear success. We will team up with Indra Software Labs and another Spanish University to gain momentum and ensure an efficient outcome.

Mobility is one of those ways to go. I was thinking (but no time, as usual) of writing about “SMS: From Short Message Service to Semantic Mobile Services”, a simple article which would point out a number of issues about new mobile services. Because in a nutshell, they show the same requirements as Semantic Web Services:

• Data interpretation and mediation
• Process interpretation and mediation
• Data storage and retrieval
• Business logic execution based on data
• Agent interoperability

In all, this whole field looks quite promising since most apps I know are heading towards the mobile (it was time, ages we are waiting for this).

Straight from the horse´s mouth, Twine claims to be, pointed out at Slashdot and at this technology review, “a Semantic Web application because the software was written with Semantic Web standards, established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), in mind. This means that its design follows certain conventions, and because of this, Twine is compatible with other Semantic Web applications, and its information can be shared across applications”.

Following the review, Twine “is a website where people can dump information that’s important to them, from strings of e-mails to YouTube videos. Or, if a user prefers, Twine can automatically collect all the Web pages she visited, e-mails she sent and received, and so on. Once Twine has some information, it starts to analyze it and automatically sort it into categories that include the people involved, concepts discussed, and places, organizations, and companies“.

This reminds me to the idea of Semantic Desktop that the Nepomuk project and the Gnowsis project by Leo Sauermann (whose presentation I attended in 2004) already presented.

If Twine is semantic because it uses RDF, then I would like to see where the hype is. And I say hype because if as Nova Spivack, the Radar Networks CEO, introduces the application, “helps you become smarter, more productive, and collaborate, share, and organize in a smarter way”, I would like to see how it beats current desktop organizing applications.

Time to play with the application and see…