http://www.topquadrant.com/

Speaker:
Irene Polikoff, Co-founder/CEO

Abstract

An ever growing variety of information is available in the digital form. This presents both an opportunity and a challenge for the business decision making. More data points mean better decisions if business users can interact with the information effectively. It can also mean growing frustration for the business users of having to manually integrate the data, understand how different aspects of information connect to each other and deal with inflexible data access mechanisms.

This talk will present TopQuadrant's rich data exploration and reporting solution based on the Semantic Web standards. We will discuss the unique features of the Semantic Web technologies that make this solutions possible and explore why more traditional technologies can not deliver the same results. We will also present how early adopters of this concept are starting to use it in the industries ranging from investment banking to pharmaceutical research.

Ms. Polikoff has over 20 years of experience in business application development and deployment, consulting, software development and strategic planning. Since co-founding TopQuadrant in 2001 Irene has been involved in more than a dozen projects, both with government and with commercial organizations. She has written strategy papers, trained customers on the use of the Semantic Web standards, developed ontology models, designed solution architectures and defined deployment processes and guidance. With the evolution of TopQuadrant from a technology consultant to a technology provider, Irene has been playing an active role in requirements and design of TopQuadrant's Semantic Solution Platform - TopBraid Suite.

Before starting TopQuadrant Irene was a Principal in the national Knowledge, Content Management and Portals Practice in IBM Global Services. Prior to that she was a Senior Development Manager and a Project Executive for IBM worldwide consultant's tools and methods.At TopQuadrant, Irene consults with clients on Semantics-based Enterprise Architecture, Ontology Development and Design and Architecture of Semantic Web solutions.

Prior to IBM, Ms. Polikoff held IT management positions at Fortune 500 companies where she was responsible for development and deployment of enterprise-wide mission critical information systems. Irene has a background in Operations Research and a strong interest in technologies for software innovation. She is co-author of a recently published book on software requirements and architecture - "Capability Cases: Solution Envisioning Approach".

Catering sponsor:

Alitora Systems
http://www.alitora.com

Host: Dario Laverde, NYC Java Study Groups JUG and the New York University

Meetup Track:
This Session is hands on and technical

Speakers: Rich Hickey and David Siegel

Rich Hickey will join forces with the New York Semantic Web Meetup to present Clojure for the use in the development of Semantic Web applications.

http://clojure.org

Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.

Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs.

Session prep:

Introduction to Clojure
http://blip.tv/file/982823

The Reader
http://clojure.org/reader

Evaluation
http://clojure.org/evaluation

Special Forms
http://clojure.org/special_forms

Data Structures
http://clojure.org/data_structures

Sequences
http://clojure.org/sequences

Java Interop
http://clojure.org/java_interop

Location Sponsor: Milla Bakhareva, CEO Istari Technologies
Event sponsor: Semantic Universe http://www.semanticuniverse.com

http://www.swnyc.org/index.php?title=A_Gentle_Introduction_To_Modeling_with_OWL

A Gentle Introduction To Modeling with OWL
Gerald McCollam
OpenMine, LLC

- RDF Schema Overview (RDFS)
- RDFS-Plus
- Basic OWL

The Web Ontology Language OWL is here to stay. We will put OWL to work for us in a number of spikes. This is a practical session that gets you started with domain modelling concepts and ontology language constructs. Agile style, bring your laptop!

"The Semantic Web Is Open For Business. Are You Ready?"

The New York Semantic Web Meetup organizes a panel discussion in collaboration with the LinkedData Planet Conference on June 17, 2008. This session takes places right after Sir Tim Berners-Lee's keynote
and has the format of an informal panel discussion.

http://www.swnyc.org/index.php?title=New_York_Semantic_Web_Meetup_Panel_Discussion_LinkedData_Planet_2008

During the session the panel will take questions from the audience. What is the Semantic Web? A growing number of online services already support Semantic Web technologies to improve interoperability and publish data on the web. The Semantic Web is an effort lead by the W3C to introduce the ability to encode meaning of web content in the form of metadata. In the current web content is created with the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) to describe the layout and linking of content. In the Semantic Web content is typed based on meaning full annotations expressed as fully qualified URIs. This will allow structured searches across distributed web resources in the web of data: The Data Web. The evolution of the current Web of "linked documents" to a Web of "linked data" is steadily gaining mindshare among developers, architects, systems integrators, users, and more than 200 software companies developing semantic web- oriented solutions. The LinkedData
Planet conference provides industry professionals with insights into the technologies that will enable them to:

* connect data contained in silos within organizations in a meaningful way

* extract and correlate data from web sites and databases for purposes

such as analyzing trends and decision support, customer and vendor relationship management, and social networking

Panel Team

Panel Organizer:

Marco Neumann, New York Semantic Web Meetup

Moderators:

Hank Williams, Founder and CEO, Kloudshare
Eric Hoffer, Second Integral

Panelists:

Sergey Chernyshev, CTO, Semantic Communities LLC

Dan Connolly, Research Scientist, W3 (tentative)

Christine Connors, Global Director, Semantic Technology Solutions, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Taylor Cowan, Emerging Solutions Principal, Sabre Holdings, Travelocity

Richard Cyganiak, Reseacher, DERI and Project Leader D2RQ http://www.d2rq.org

Nic Fulton PhD, Chief Scientist, Reuters Media

Marc Hadfield, President and CTO, Alitora

Savas Parastastidis PhD, Architect, Technical Computing, Microsoft Research

LinkedData Planet
New York Semantic Web Meetup Panel
6.30-8.30pm June 17, 2008
The Roosevelt Hotel, NYC
http://www.linkeddataplanet.com

For a free New York Semantic Web Meetup access pass please register
with the customer code: NYSWS08
http://www.swnyc.org/ftp/ldp_pass_NYSWS08.pdf

Speaker:

Christian Hempelmann (hakia)

Richard Cyganiak (DERI)

Search for Meaning
Dr Christian Hempelmann, hakia

Abstract
This talk presents a linguistic approach for deep-meaning representation, ontological semantics (OntoSem), for a specific, complex NLP application: A Meaning-Based Internet Search Engine.

It introduces the OntoSem resources and technology, which are available for licensing, to provide a general overview of the specific methods in which OntoSem is used in our Internet search approach and give an in-depth account of selected key issues in web search and how we address them. For web search, the OntoSem technology parses natural language web content and transposes it into a representation of its meaning, structured around the events described in the text and their participants. Queries can then be matched to this meaning representation in anticipation of any of the permutations in which they can surface in written text. These permutations centrally include overspecification (e.g., not listing all synonyms, which non-semantic search engines require their users to do) and, more importantly, underspecification (as language does in principle). For the latter case, ambiguity can only be reduced by giving the search engine what humans use for disambiguation, namely knowledge of the world as represented in an ontology. One key assumption is that meaning for web search requires complex description for automatic generation and can in principle not be extracted from surface text with statistical methods, since meaning is content and does not lend itself to automatic extraction from natural language without rich knowledge resources. For more information, please visit http://labs.hakia.com/hakia-lab-onto.html.

Bootstrapping the Semantic Web with Open Data - The Linking Open Data Project
Richard Cyganiak
DERI

A prerequisite for the Semantic Web is the existence of large amounts of meaningfully interlinked RDF data on the Web. The W3C SWEO community project Linking Open Data has made various open datasets available on the Web as RDF, and developed automated mechanisms to interlink them with RDF statements. Collectively the datasets currently consist of over one billion triples. We believe that large scale interlinking will demonstrate the value of the Semantic Web compared to more centralized approaches. This presentation outlines the work to date and gives a short demonstration.

The Open Data Movement aims at making data freely available to everyone. There are already various interesting open data sets availiable on the Web. Examples include Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Geonames, MusicBrainz, WordNet, the DBLP bibliography and many more which are published under Creative Commons or Talis licenses.

The goal of the W3C SWEO Linking Open Data community project is to extend the Web with a data commons by publishing various open datasets as RDF on the Web and by setting RDF links between data items from different data sources.

RDF links enable you to navigate from a data item within one data source to related data items within other sources using a Semantic Web browser. RDF links can also be followed by the crawlers of Semantic Web search engines, which may provide sophisticated search and query capabilities over crawled data. As query results are structured data and not just links to HTML pages, they can be used within other applications.

http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData