A full day seminar presented by Dean Allemang. This workshop is being coordinated by Dr. Ahmed Abbasi, Assistant Professor in Management Information, Lubar School of Business, UW-Milwaukee

Overview

The advent of the World Wide Web has marked a cultural change in the utilization of information on a par with the development of the Gutenberg press. But the design of the Web defies conventional wisdom about how information is represented and shared. How can we harness the power that created the Web and many of the powerful phenomena that arose from it, such as Wikipedia, social networking, and news aggregation, and apply that power to the management of distributed data, especially in an enterprise? This is the question that has given rise to the set of technologies known as the Semantic Web.

This workshop, based on the book of the same name (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2008), will describe the unique features that made the Web the success it is today. These features have far-reaching ramifications when applied to information management for business applications within a complex enterprise. The workshop will include business-level discussions about how to apply this technology to solve persistent enterprise information management problems, as well as technical discussion and demonstration exercises about how the technologies actually work.

Topics

●Semantic Web: What it is and isn’t. The name “Semantic Web” refers to a lot of things. The most mature, coherent technical definition lies in a series of representation recommendations from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This workshop will define what the basic standards (RDF, RDFS, SPARQL, and OWL) mean and how they work together to form a coherent information-sharing infrastructure.

●How to distribute data across the Web. The current Web distributes documents over the Web and allows access to individual databases across the Web. This workshop will show how the Semantic Web creates an integrated web of data.

●Linked data. How the RDF and RDFS standards allow data to be linked over the Web.

●Semantic modeling. The role of modeling in describing how linked data can be accessed and leveraged to provide synergistic value.

About the speaker

Dr. Allemang specializes in innovative applications of knowledge technology and, as Chief Scientist at TopQuadrant, brings over 15 years of experience in research, deployment, and development of knowledge-based systems. He developed the curriculum for TopQuadrant’s world-wide successful training series for Semantic Web technologies. He is co-author of the popular book “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist.” Dean has worked and studied extensively throughout the US and Europe, completing a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall scholar, a PhD at Ohio State University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Scholar, and is a two-time winner of the Swiss Prize for Innovation in Technology.

Who should Attend?

Business managers. Many business-level practitioners can benefit from an understanding of the Semantic Web.

Content managers. Content managers will understand how controlled vocabularies, content management systems, and other knowledge assets can be distributed and federated using the Semantic Web.

Web developers. Developers will understand how the Semantic Web is important with respect to Web-based data.

Enterprise architects. Information officers interested in coping with problems of distribution of in formation across a complex enterprise will benefit from an understanding of the Semantic Web.

Database architects and designers. The Semantic Web is a powerful extension (and justification) of data modeling practices that database architects and designers are familiar with. They will walk away from this workshop with a powerful new tool whose possibilities they can explore.

Object-oriented programmers. When introduced to the Semantic Web, object-oriented programmers often think they are seeing something they already know very well. This workshop will demonstrate the many differences between the Semantic Web and object-oriented programming models.

Coordinator

Dr. Ahmed Abbasi is an Assistant Professor in Management Information, Lubar School of Business, UW-Milwaukee