Introduction to Semantic Technologies Semantic Technology is moving from the innovators to the early adopters. This tutorial focuses on why this shift is happening now. We will explain how the technology works terms and illustrations that a motivated lay person can understand. But be warned we will cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time. The tutorial will be organized as follows:
• Problems Semantic Technology Solves – We will very briefly outline ten of the most pressing problems for IT today, and foreshadow the rest of the presentation (that is what is it that is different about Semantic Technology that will make these problems more tractable)
• How Semantic Technology Works, part 1 – drawing on a set of Tinker Toys and some custom animation, we explain how a few simple departures from traditional technology make possible many of the benefits of Semantic Technology.
• Linked Data: Open, Enterprise and Otherwise – We will discuss the Linked Open Data Cloud, how it is that 30 billion accessible nuggets of information came to be, and how people are using them as a shared asset. We will also discuss how organizations are creating their own internal Linked Data Clouds and what they are doing with them.
• How Semantic Technology Works, part 2 – moving from linked data to ontologies we describe what inference is, how one constructs an ontology. We will cover what it means to separate the structure of knowledge from its meaning. We will compare ontologically driven systems to taxonomic and traditional.
• 14 Things You Can Do With Your Enterprise Ontology – Building an Enterprise Ontology is one thing, putting it to work is another. In this section we outline 14 types of projects that are logical successors to an Enterprise Ontology development project. We very briefly describe what distinguishes these projects from each other and how they benefit from the characteristics of semantic technology.
• Wrap Up and What To Do Next – in the conclusion we close the circle from the intro and describe how these technologies address the ten pressing problems introduced in the beginning. We also give some advice on how to get started. Might even answer a question or two.