White Papers

Semantic Web Solutions at Work in the Enterprise
FEA Ontology Modeling White Paper
Semantic Technology Briefing
Semantic Solutions - Getting Started
Dictionary of Search Terminology

Semantic Web Solutions at Work in the Enterprise

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The amount of digitized information is growing at unprecedented rate. By 2007 the size
of individual databases at many organizations reached up to hundreds and in some
cases thousands of terabytes. For example, in 2004 AT&T had 11 exabytes (10⁷ TB) of
wireline, wireless and Internet data. This is an equivalent amount of data to that held
by 1 million Libraries of Congress. Wal-Mart had 500 terabytes of transactional data
and was adding 10⁷ transactions per day. On average, the size of transactional databases
doubles every five years with core databases doubling every two years. Data reporting
and analysis warehouses (OLAP stores) triple in size every three years. On the web, by
2007 there were 29.7 billion pages, roughly five pages for every man, woman, and child
on the planet. In 2006 alone, the size of the information created or replicated worldwide
was 161 exabytes (10⁸ TB).

FEA Ontology Modeling White Paper

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This white paper describes the design of the Federal Enterprise Architecture Reference Ontology Models (FEA RMO). Five models have been encoded in OWL (W3C standard Web Ontology Language).  The paper is organized in the following sections:

• FEA RMO Ontology Models – this section describes FEA RMO architecture and identifies business value and potential of the models
• Assessment of the Semantics of the FEA – this section describes some inconsistencies, conflicts and omissions discovered in the process of formalizing FEA framework as ontology models
• Use Cases of the FEA RMO – this section describes representative use cases
• FEA RMO Development Approach – this section describes the design patterns used by FEA RMO; it is intended for people interested in using and extending the models
• Tooling Issues – this section describes technical issues with the state of the art ontology tools discovered during FEA RMO development
• Recommendations and Future Plans – this section describes our “wish list”, defining where and how we would like to see the work progressing; it also identifies FEA RMO deployment and governance options.

Semantic Technology Briefing

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We define semantic technology as a software technology that allows the meaning of and associations between information to be known and processed at execution time. For a semantic technology to be truly at work within a system there must be a knowledge model of some part of the world that is used by one or more applications at execution time.

• How is Semantic Technology distinguished from more conventional applications?
• What are its key capabilities?
• How are Knowledge Models (Ontologies) different from other Software Models?
• How does Semantic Technology fit into overall architecture of business applications?

This paper addresses these and other questions we have often been asked to answer. The briefing also includes a revised and updated version of our popular Semantic Integration Strategies and Tools paper.

Semantic Solutions - Getting Started

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Semantic technologies, such as ontologies, show great promise for the next generation of more capable information technology solutions because they can solve some problems much more simply than before and make it possible to provide certain capabilities that have otherwise been very difficult to support. But despite its clear advantages, there are still major obstacles to be overcome before the potential of semantic technologies will become a reality.
In this paper we confirm that the potential of ontology-enabled solutions is not a myth, and remarkable things are possible. But, we also reveal that there is little magic either (perhaps some, but not enough to make a silver bullet). To assist industry pioneers to get started, we outline an approach for the practical application of ontology enabled solutions. The approach focuses on understanding the evolving capabilities of the technology well enough to execute an effective solution, together with recommending an essential ingredient - forging a shared understanding among key stakeholders in a suitable initial project.

Dictionary of Search Terminology

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The problem of Information Retrieval continues to attract increasing attention as the oceans of unstructured data organizations have already captured, and are continuing to capture, keep on growing. At the same time accurate and speedy access to the information is becoming ever more difficult.
In selecting the right search tool many factors need to be taken in to account, including:

• Nature of typical search queries (studies have found important differences between e-commerce product search, customer service / tech support search and other types of searches)
• Form, format and location of the information and knowledge sources
• Organization’s information publishing processes
• Availability of the metadata, custom dictionaries and taxonomies
• Readiness of an organization to engage in a continuous process necessary to achieve search precision