OWL for the Enterprise

This is a lively interactive session where we learn together by doing. After a minute or two introducing what an ontology is, we jump right into the process of building one. We consider everyday subjects such as healthcare and finance. Participants identify what the key things are in those subjects and how they are related to each other. Understanding these relationships is fundamental to understanding and modeling a subject as an ontology. We illustrate several situations where the ontology sanctions the drawing of conclusions based on what has been already said. Initially, all the material is presented using everyday language. We then transition to the more technical terms required by OWL. By the end, the participant will discover that they just saw the majority of the core features in OWL. Key learning points include:

An ontology is a model of some subject matter that you care about. It consists of a set of assertions represented as triples.
An ontology can be used both informally for human communication and computationally for data storage and ontology-driven applications.
An ontology consists of a series of statements of just a few main types. These include saying that there are: individual things, kinds of things, more general/special kinds, and most importantly relationships that connect things to other things or to literals.
Saying things very precisely enables the computer to automatically draw conclusions.

Michael Uschold has over two decades experience in developing and transitioning semantic technology from academia to industry. He pioneered the field of ontology engineering, co-authoring the first paper and giving the first tutorial on the topic in 1995 in the UK. As a senior ontology consultant at Semantic Arts from October 2010, Michael trains and guides clients to better understand and leverage semantic technology. He has built commercial enterprise ontologies in digital asset management, finance, healthcare, legal research, consumer products, electrical devices, manufacturing and corporation registration. From 2008-2009, Uschold worked at Reinvent on a team that developed a semantic advertising platform that substantially increased revenue. As a research scientist at Boeing from 1997-2008 he defined, led and participated in numerous projects applying semantic technology to enterprise challenges. He is a frequent invited speaker and panelist at national and international events, and serves on the editorial board of the Applied Ontology Journal. He received his Ph.D. in AI from Edinburgh University in 1991 and an MSc. from Rutgers University in Computer Science in 1982.