I attended the 1st U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium (#US2TS), hosted by Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio on March 1-2, 2018. The goal of this meeting was to bring together the U.S. community interested in Semantic Technologies. I was extremely happy to see 120 people get together in Dayton, Ohio to discuss semantics for 2 days. I’m glad to see such a vibrant community in the U.S. … and not just academics. Actually, I would say that academics were the minorities. I saw a lot of familiar faces and met a lot of people from different areas.

The program was organized around the following topics: Cross Cutting Technologies, Publishing and Retrieving, Space and Time and Life Sciences. Each topic had a set of panelists. Each panelist gave a 10 minute talk. There was plenty of time for discussion and a break out session. It was a very lively. The program can be found here: http://us2ts.org/posts/program/

I gave a 10 min version of my talk “Integrating Relational Databases with the Semantic Web: a journey between two cities“. The takeaway message: in order to use semantic technologies to address the data challenges of business intelligence and data integrate, we need to fulfill the role of the Knowledge Engineer and empowered them with new tools and methodologies. Looks like I did a good job at it and it was well received 😃

Really enjoying @juansequeda's down-to-earth plain talking style here at #US2TS pic.twitter.com/sJmvBF5lFg

— Mike Amundsen (@mamund) March 1, 2018

Two main topics: Ontologies and Tools

Complexity and Usability of ontologies was a topic throughout the two days. Hallway talk is that light semantics is enough (happily surprised to hear this). However, Life Science and Spatial domain need heavyweight semantics (more below). CIDOC-CRM is the ontology used in the museum domain. Apparently very complicated. A lot of people don’t like it but they have to use it.

Linked Open USABLE Data (LOUD): We need to find a balance between usable and complexity.

#us2ts usability vs completeness of an Ontology. And Linked Open USABLE Data (LOUD) pic.twitter.com/6u6M9GePwR

— Juan Sequeda (@juansequeda) March 1, 2018

I was part of a breakout session on ontologies and reuse. I really appreciated Peter Fox’s comment on ontologies (paraphrasing): there are three sides that we need to take into account 1) expressivity, 2) maintainability and 3) evolvability

#us2ts breakout session report on ontology modeling and reuse @juansequeda pic.twitter.com/NTBZDgqtdF

— Pascal Hitzler (@pascalhitzler) March 2, 2018

I shared our pay-as-you-go methodology to create ontologies and mappings in a poster and in hallway discussions. It was well received.

Tools Tools TOOLS: we need better tools. That was another theme of the meeting. There seemed to be an agreement with my claim that the existing tools are made for the semantic city.

JSON-LD came up a lot. People love it.

Application Areas of Semantics

As expected, Life science was present at this meeting. Melissa Haendel from Oregon Health & Science University showed some really cool results that were possible thanks to semantics. Chris Mungall from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory gave an overview of the Gene Ontology.

Take away message from the Gene Ontology work and @chrismungall #US2TS pic.twitter.com/qofZ8p6Q6T

— Juan Sequeda (@juansequeda) March 2, 2018

Really interesting to learn that data in the geography domain (spatial data) is complex and requires heavyweight semantics, just like in life science.

Why semantics matter in geography. Interesting!! #US2TS pic.twitter.com/anTxmnnjNv

— Juan Sequeda (@juansequeda) March 2, 2018

Interesting observations about humanities data. I see the need for semantics

Interesting points about Humanities data! #US2TS pic.twitter.com/13UIyupr54

— Juan Sequeda (@juansequeda) March 2, 2018

I need to check out perio.do: “A gazetteer of period definitions for linking and visualizing data“. One of the project leads is a fellow longhorn, Prof. Adam Rabinowitz. I want to meet him!

Meeting people

Great chatting with Varish Mulwad from GE Research and learning about all the semantic work that is going on at GE Research. Need to check out Semtk (Semantics Toolkit ) and these papers: .

SemTK: An Ontology-first, Open Source Semantic Toolkit for Managing and Querying Knowledge Graphs

Integrated access to big data polystores through a knowledge-driven framework

I enjoy meeting Alessandro Oltramari and learning about the semantic work going on at Bosch.

Great to finally meet Vinh Nguyen. Her PhD was on Contextualized Knowledge Graphs (I should take a look at her PhD dissertation) and she is now organizing an ISWC 2018 workshop on this topic.

Happy Birthday Craig Knoblock!! He gave a fantastic keynote on his birthday!

Glad to have bumped into Ora Lassila. It’s been a long time!!

Future research directions

Important Directions for future research from @caknoblock. I agree with these. My interest are on 2) and 3) #US2TS pic.twitter.com/IyQS5LOJHr

— Juan Sequeda (@juansequeda) March 1, 2018

#us2ts @dlmcguinness Gaps and Directions pic.twitter.com/khEgzNlBYx

— Juan Sequeda (@juansequeda) March 1, 2018

#us2ts @timFinin The Good, bad and beautiful pic.twitter.com/e9MTFIuK8o

— Juan Sequeda (@juansequeda) March 1, 2018

Take aways from the Meeting

Thoughts about #us2ts from @cbaru, senior advisor for Data Science @NSF_CISE pic.twitter.com/Cd3a9h6I5C

— Juan Sequeda (@juansequeda) March 2, 2018

Excellent presentation by @yolandagil making the case for the Open Knowledge Network and comparing Semantic Technologies today with Supercomputing in the 1980s. Additionally a clear roadmap resulting from this #us2ts meeting pic.twitter.com/DEQ5P5MrPT

— Juan Sequeda (@juansequeda) March 2, 2018

This is an event that was missing in the U.S. I’m glad that it was organized (Fantastic job Pascal and Krzysztof!). Looking forward to this event next year!