What is Semantic Technology?

With Gartner and Forrester both identifying semantic technology as a key trend to watch in 2013, the first question many folks are asking is, "What is semantic technology?" My goal here is to answer that question, not in a rigorous academic or historical way, but in the way I answer my family and friends over dinner.

I work for a company that has a product (Anzo) built on semantic web standards so I usually start there. Anzo allows our customers to combine information from widely different sources and formats into to an environment where it can be viewed and analyzed. Okay, you say, no magic there, many software products do similar things. So, we need to dig a little deeper to understand the value:

• The information sources can be really varied: from Google News to Twitter to enterprise software to big-data systems
• When we say "combine", we don't just mean in the same place, we mean combined into the same conceptual model, regardless of the source - linked together based on common concepts
• The information is represented in human understandable form - the concepts and relationships are ones we all use every day (subject, predicate, object - a car has an engine)
• Through the model, all of the information is available in an intuitive way to searched, analyzed and visualized - we can ask questions we did not plan for up front
• When we want to add a new source of information we just add it and it becomes part of the existing model, without the traditional weeks of design or coding 

The semantic data model makes all of this possible - it is constructed of simple, human understandable"sentences" - subject, predicate, object. By linking these sentences together, we can create a conceptual model. But, this is not just the conceptual model, it is also the way the data is stored.

So, at its core, semantic technology is a very simple but very powerful concept. At Enterprise Data World, one attendee called our demonstration "magic"! While it is most definitely not magic, the power and flexibility of conceptually linking data from disparate sources must be seen to be believed. This is truly breakthrough technology with significant implications for large enterprises.

For more information, please visit www.cambridgesemantics.com or contact me at marty@cambridgesemantics.com

@mloughlin

DATA Demo Day May 16th, 2013

Rayburn House, Washington, DC

On Thursday May 16th, Cambridge Semantics (CSI) participated in DATA demo day in Washington, DC. The event, hosted by House majority leader' Eric Cantor, was an opportunity for leading technology vendors to demonstrate how their products could leverage the data standards proposed in the DATA Act to make government spending more transparent and to identify waste and fraud. As a member of the DATA Transparency Coalition, Cambridge Semantics was invited to show how our unified information access software, Anzo, could help with this challenge.

At CSI,  we work with large pharmaceutical and financial enterprises to help them better manage and leverage their data. Anzo is a data integration platform, based on semantic technology, that is very good at combining data from disparate sources into a unified, business consumable model over which you can search, run analytics and build visualizations.

For DATA demo day, we loaded information from recovery.gov and the System for Award Management (SAM) into our platform to demonstrate some key capabilities:

• Ability to easily link together data from very different sources
  
• Present data in models and terms familiar to business users
• Fully interactive search, analysis and visualization of the data
• Examples of how to use the combined data to identify fraud

Recovery.gov contains information about awards by contractor. The SAM data includes information about the contractors such as number of employees. By linking these data sets, in this case by contractor name, we are able to ask some interesting questions. A simple example is looking at the dollar value of awards in relation to the size of the contractor. We can easily highlight the outlying cases of small contractors receiving very big awards. While not necessarily an indication of fraud, the extreme cases are worthy of further investigation.

If the DATA Act is adopted, government spending information will be tagged and made available for public consumption in machine readable formats. Combined with solutions like CSI's semantic platform, this will enable aggregation of spend across agencies and make deep, interactive analysis of the combined data widely accessible.

For more information, please visit www.cambridgesemantics.com or email me at marty@cambridgesemantics.com

@mloughlin