Wednesday, 5/23/2007
9:15 AM - 10:15 AM
Level: Case Study

Almost two years ago, and at the very first SemTech conference, we demonstrated the extraction of an OWL/SWRL ontology from a Visio-based product ontology editor, along with its import into a Prolog-based, forward-chaining reasoner, and its use for product configuration. We used that demonstration as the centrepiece for two related theses: first, and notwithstanding its obvious promise for reasoning about taxonomies, OWL’s breakthrough into real, across-the-board commercial success will be entirely contingent on its enhancement through rules. And secondly, that product configuration, as one of the very few commercially successful products of the "AI" boom of the 1980s, could – or perhaps even should – serve as a model for future semantic modelling practices, not least because of its focus on and use of rules.

This year we will support the same argument with real, industrial-strength, working and productive software, and with the knowledge that the W3C is now almost two years into the Rules Standardization activity that kicked off almost immediately after that conference. The centrepiece will be a single, real-life, daily-used "product knowledgebase" in SAP. A "knowledgebase" that consists, after we have automatically extracted it from SAP into its OWL/SWRL representation, of some 600 classes, 600 properties, 3000 individuals, and 1200 rules. A “knowledgebase” that consists, in other words, of some 27MB of uncompressed OWL XML. We will show how all of that knowledge can be boiled down into just 300KB of valid Cartesian subspaces built up around no more than three fundamental array operations – resulting in extremely fast run-time execution. And following that we will describe what we believe are some of the most important challenges facing the Semantic Web endeavour.

Henk Meeter is co-founder of Integrity GmbH, a consulting firm focused around product configuration in the SAP application landscape. He was one of the founders of the Configuration Workgroup (www.configurationworkgroup.com), a professional organization – like his company devoted to product configuration – which has grown, since 1993, to some 2000 registered members, and was from 1994 through 1997 its Chairman, as well as, more recently, in 2005, its President. Henk grew up in and around New York City, and studied Philosophy and History at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After serving from 1975 through 1982 as a Child Care Worker for Severely Emotionally Impaired adolescents, Henk moved into IT, starting as a Computer Operator, and moving, gradually, into programming, systems analysis, business analysis, and, ultimately, consulting. For the past several years Henk has been doing all of his consulting either for SAP directly, or for its customers.