Semantics Enabled Industrial and Scientific Applications:
Research, Technology and Deployed Applications

Amit Sheth, LSDIS Lab, The University of Georgia and Semagix

Semantics can already be seen as the key enabler for the new breed of enterprise and scientific applications.  I have had the unique vantage point of seeing Semantic Web research transition from academic research at the LSDIS lab to commercialization at Taalee and Semagix, and further on to powering applications serving Enterprise customers and scientific research partners. 

In this talk, we will review several ontology-driven applications and information systems.  For commercial applications, we will focus on Enterprise applications deployed by Semagix’s customers.  More specifically, these include risk management applications such as Anti-money Laundering and Case Management in Law Enforcement, and compliance application such as Security Clearance and Insider Threat Management.  For scientific research applications, we will primarily look at clinical health-care and bioinformatics applications.  For a Semantic Web platform that can support such applications, we will review the requirements, capabilities and state of the art technologies related to the following:

• expressiveness of knowledge representations (ontology representation language),
• development of large populated ontologies that are regularly updated,
• automatic metadata extraction and annotation involving heterogeneous textual as well as scientific experiment data,
• high-performance and scalable query and rule processing
• reasoning that computes semantic associations leading to identification or discovery of patterns or interesting/suspicious paths and complex relationships,
• semantic visualization and semantic virtual interfaces for high-bandwidth user interactions with heterogeneous data, metadata and ontologies, and
• the role of standardards including RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL, SWRL, etc.

We will also review our experiences in building practical ontologies that have involved hundreds of classes to a few million instances/assertions, and the approaches to deal with scalability and performance challenges in building real-world applications.

Background information for this talk can be found at:

Article in Data Engineering special issue on Making the Semantic Web Real (Dec. 2003) http://wwwt.semagix.com/documents/SemanticWebTechinAction.pdf

Commercial Technology: http://www.semagix.com/download.html

Semantic Discovery Projects at UGA & UMBC:  SemDis project

Active Semantic Document with application to Electronic Medical Records: http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/projects/asdoc/

Bioinformatics Ontologies and Applications: Glycomics project

Semantics for the Semantic Web: the Implicit, the Formal and the Powerful: http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/library/download/SRT05-IJ-SW-IS.pdf 

Speaker Biography

Amit Sheth is a professor of Computer Science at The University of Georgia (UGA) and the CTO of Semagix, Inc.  He started the LSDIS lab at UGA in 1994. For nine years before, he served in R&D groups at Bellcore, Unisys, and Honeywell.  In August 1999, Dr. Sheth founded Taalee, Inc., based on the SCORE technology developed at the LSDIS lab, and managed it as CEO until June 2001. Following acquisition/merger of Taalee and its follow-on Voquette resulting in Semagix, he currently serves as its CTO.  His research has led to two successful companies, three significant commercial products, several deployed applications, and over 200 publications. He has given 20+ keynotes and 160+ invited talks/colloquia, has served on over 110 program committees, led organization of 20+ international conferences/workshops and is the Editor in Chief of  International Journal on Semantic Web & Information Systems.  He received his BE from BITS (Pilani, India) and MS and PhD from OSU (Columbus, OH, USA). He has been elected as an IEEE Fellow.