Thursday, November 29, 2007

Day 2 at the Ontology Conference

My second day at the ontology conference was quite good. I impressed by the various teams which presented their papers on they were designing and implementing ontology based systems. The biggest theme from the conference was that the current technology and lack of defined ontology methodologies was the biggest drawback in this field. Most of the applications are prototypes and they are extremely slow in processing decent sized ontology. I heard talks about reasoners, owl, geo-spatial ontologies, multi-order logic processors, ontologies in graph databases, etc., etc. However the applications which were using these technologies were prototypes. The other problem was that if ontologies were not built correctly then the results were hideously wrong. Everyone in the conference agreed that ontologies and their applications are still new in the field of IT however the promise of ontologies and their applications is so great that large organizations keep funding R&D in the field. I personally enjoyed my time at the conference since it was good to see other data lovers and people who understood the value of data in any IT enterprise. I will probably go again next year. Here is a list of products which were mentioned in the seminar.
  • Knoodl.com - A semantic wiki. It creates ontologies from the wiki entries or uses uploaded ontologies in categorizing wiki entries.
  • VideoQuest - This product searches entities in a video. For example, if the user typed in the query "white car in saint louis" then the result set would include videos which have a white car in Saint Louis. The backend of this product is based off ontologies.
  • Poised For Learning - Rensselaer Polytechnic University's Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (RAIR) Laboratory's Ontology product which is based reasoners. I was very impressed with this research.
As you can see there weren't many products since this area is still new. That's all for now.

No comments: