The Business Significance

ofUpper Ontology

Mills DavisProject10X

mdavis@project10x.com

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Topics

• What are semantic technologies?• Why now?• What capabilities make semantic

technologies different?• Where is the market going?• Role of upper ontology

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What are Semantic Technologies?

A shift in paradigm, technology & economics

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Semantic Technologies:Representing meanings & knowledge about things so both computers and

people can work with it

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So, what do semantic technologies do?

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Semantic technologies model knowledge about infrastructure, information, behavior,

& domain expertise separately from programs and data…

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Knowledge Plane:Semantic technologies affect all layers

of the IT stack

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Semantic Bandwidth:More metadata, semantic modeling &

knowledge representation, more reasoning capability

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Semantic Capabilities:Meet challenges of development,

infrastructure, information, knowledge, and behavior

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Why now? Need to solve problems of scale,

complexity, function, performance, and agility…

SCALE CHANGE CHANGE MANAGEMENTMANAGEMENT

COMPLEXITY

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Why now?Need to improve economics and reduce risks across all stages of the solution

lifecycle

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Why now?Issues of national significance demand

solution

Examples:• Scientific method for in silico

research• Semantic interoperability of

systems and information• Multi-lingual computing

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Where are we headed?Value gains from two-fold to more than

100 times

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Conclusion

• Where we are — Today, semantic technology is a tiny fraction of the $1.2T ITC market. Information technologies, stack architecture, and procedural algorithmic programming paradigms dominate.

• Where we’re going — Near-to-mid-term, look for rapid uptake of semantic web and related open standards to solve system plumbing and information interoperability problems. Focus is net-centric infrastructure, knowledge work automation, subject ontologies, and social networks. Still issues of scale and complexity.

• Where we’re really going — Over the next decade, towards universal knowledge technology, executable domain knowledge, & systems that know and learn.

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THANK YOU