Ora Lassila: "On the broad applicability of Semantic Web technologies" (SWSA Ten-Year award 2011)
When: Tue Dec 7th 2021 at 18:00 (CET) / Tue Dec 7th 2021 at 12:00 (EST) / Wed Dec 8th 2021 at 1:00 (CST)
About the speaker:
Ora Lassila is a Principal Technologist at Amazon
Web Services, working in the Neptune graph database team. Earlier, he
has held research and product development positions in many
organizations interested in complex data problems, ontologies, and AI.
Together with his co-authors he was the recipient of the first SWSA
“10-year award”. He was also a co-author of the original RDF
specification as well as a co-author of the seminal article on the
Semantic Web. Dr. Lassila is a graduate of the Helsinki University of
Technology.
About the talk:
The Semantic Web, despite how it was originally advertised,
was not a replacement for the World Wide Web, nor was it really
knowledge representation (KR) solely for the Web. Rather, the Semantic
Web is KR using Web technologies. The different technologies and
standards of the Semantic Web have broad applicability in many areas
distinctly outside of what we consider to be the “Web”. The DAML-S
(later OWL-S) effort was one such example: apply ontologies to the
problem of describing the semantics of functionality and services (in
this case Web services, but the concept was more general). While the
effort may not have been successful in the long term, it was an early
example of the application of Semantic Web technologies and approaches
to a wide variety of use cases and domains. These include agent-based
computing, ubiquitous computing, context-awareness, policies, privacy,
enterprise knowledge graphs, and many others. But there is still an
even bigger role for Semantic Web technologies: Modern enterprise data
practice is messy, with daunting problems such as data integration,
elimination of “data silos”, and alignment of semantics. This
“messiness” will be perpetuated until we have a practical unifying
logical representation for data and semantics, and the promise of
Semantic Web is that it could be this representation.
Olaf Hartig: "tbd" (SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award 2015 and SWSA Ten-Year award 2019)
When: Mon Feb 7th 2022 at 18:00 (CET) / Mon Feb 7th 2022 at 12:00 (EST) / Tue Feb 8th 2022 at 1:00 (CST)