Monday, 5/21/2007
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Level: Technical - Introductory

The objective of this tutorial is for participants to gain an understanding of:

• What semantic technologies are
• Why they are useful
• How they relate to more conventional technologies
• How to begin a semantic technologies project

Semantic Technologies are based on models that explicitly encode the meaning of information to avoid ambiguity and support automated reasoning. These models are usually called "ontologies." Automated reasoning is supported to check consistency and to infer new information. Semantic technologies provide a variety of uses and benefits, including information integration, better search, sharing and reuse, improved flexibility and reliability and cheaper maintenance. A major part of this tutorial is devoted to clarifying the relationships between the many different modeling formalisms that are the basis for semantic technologies. These include: controlled vocabularies, thesauri, taxonomies, ontologies, object-oriented models and database schema. We will critically evaluate the true yet misleading claim that ontologies have formal semantics that allow for unambiguous representation of information. We close by considering what you might do to get started on your own semantic technology project.

This tutorial will cover important material that is just not available anywhere, and about which there is a great deal of confusion. Namely, that there are so many things called ontologies, and they are very different from each other – yet there are also core similarities (hence the confusion). We also warn against misreading comments about ‘unambiguous semantics’ which can lead people to think that automated reasoners are much smarter than they in fact are. This in a form of hype that the emerging field can do without.

Leo Obrst and Mike Uschold have for many years been independently developing high quality introductory material on semantic technologies, ontologies and the semantic web, in papers, talks and at least one book. This is a unique opportunity to develop and present a coherent and synergistic set of material.

Dr. Mike Uschold is a research scientist at Boeing Phantom Works, the advanced research and development organization of The Boeing Company. His interests center around the field concerned with the development and application of ontologies. This includes the emerging Semantic Web, semantic integration, knowledge management, and more recently, in the area of applying ontologies to autonomous system navigation. For over two decades, Mike has been involved in a wide range of activities in these areas, including research, applications and teaching. Dr. Uschold has served on the industrial advisory boards of various projects and initiatives, and given a number of invited talks at conferences, workshops, and Universities. He received his B.S. in mathematics and physics at Canisis College in Buffalo, N.Y in 1977, a Masters in computer science from Rutgers University in 1982, and a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from The University of Edinburgh in 1991. Before arriving at the Boeing Company in 1997, Dr. Uschold was a senior member of technical staff in the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) at the University of Edinburgh. He has also been a lecturer and a research associate at the Department of AI at the University of Edinburgh.