A Brief Survey of Semantic Technology Standards & Approaches

Semantic Technologies Call 3
In our third call, we’ll explore some of the nuts and bolts of formats and standards that organizations are developing and adopting to the ‘semantic approach’.  Some of these have been around for many years in such fields as publishing, government, life sciences and financial services.  Others are fairly new and less widespread.  In any case, standards are the backbone of integration and interoperability and as the old saw goes, ‘the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from’.  Where should you be investing time and energy?  What approaches have fallen out of favor?  What does the future look like for things like OWL, RDF, SKOS and all the various flavors of XML mark up?  

In the standards world, there is no one size that fits all, and there is a tremendous amount of variability among implementations of even seemingly the “same” standards.   We’ll briefly review various classes of metadata representations and discuss how organizations are navigating the alphabet soup of standards. 

Standards and Technology for Storing Content and Metadata
Presented by Bob DuCharme
In this presentation, we'll talk about standards and technology for storing XML content, non-XML content, and the metadata associated with that content. In a production system, what's the relationship between the content and metadata? How flexible can the metadata structure be?  What role can standards play in the metadata?

As we review the standards and technology landscape, we'll cover issues such as:

• Document storage vs. XML storage
• Content standards with built-in metadata slots vs. independent metadata standards
• Standards for metadata structure vs. standards for metadata values
• Standards for defining you own metadata structures and metadata values

Introduction to OWL and Ontologies for Metadata Management
Presented by Kendall Clark
In this presentation, following the discussion of XML technology for metadata, we will consider related Semantic Web technologies, focusing primarily on RDF and OWL. We will talk about the business case for automated reasoning and inference technology for applications like decision support, analysis, etc. We will focus on the role W3C standards play in these technologies, and cover issues like:

• What transition or complementary strategies allow one to include RDF & OWL with XML projects?
• What use is an RDF Schema or OWL ontology to a taxonomy or
  taxonomy-based effort?
• How can you use RDFS and OWL to define more expressive,
  taxonomy-like structures?
• What ROI can you expect from this additional effort?