My Most Memorable Event of 2018

I travelled a lot in 2018, but actually a bit less than 2017. I flew 132,064 miles which is equivalent to 5.3x around Earth. I was on 93 flights. I spent almost 329 hours (~14 days) on a plane. I visited 11 countries: Colombia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, South Korea, Turkey, UK. I was in Austin for 174 days (my home), 53 days in Europe, 31 days in Colombia and 14 days in Mexico, India and Japan.

Given all this travel and everything I did in 2018, I asked myself: what was my most memorable event of 2018?

Answer: The 14 times I gave my talk “Integrating Semantic Web in the Real World: A Journey between Two Cities” all around the world.

Abstract: An early vision in Computer Science has been to create intelligent systems capable of reasoning on large amounts of data. Today, this vision can be delivered by integrating Relational Databases with the Semantic Web using the W3C standards: a graph data model (RDF), ontology language (OWL), mapping language (R2RML) and query language (SPARQL). The research community has successfully been showing how intelligent systems can be created with Semantic Web technologies, dubbed now as Knowledge Graphs.
However, where is the mainstream industry adoption? What are the barriers to adoption? Are these engineering and social barriers or are they open scientific problems that need to be addressed?
This talk will chronicle our journey of deploying Semantic Web technologies with real world users to address Business Intelligence and Data Integration needs, describe technical and social obstacles that are present in large organizations, and scientific and engineering challenges that require attention.

It all started when Oscar Corcho invited me to be a keynote speaker at KCAP 2017. I wanted to give a talk that described the journey I’ve been going through with Capsenta which is commercializing the research that I did in my PhD and the lessons learned throughout the process. Apparently the talk was very well received and I quickly started to get invitations.

I gave the talk at:

1. Imperial College London. London, UK. Jan 2018. Invited by Bob Kowalski.
2. Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University. Milton Keynes, UK. Feb 2018. Invited by Miriam Fernandez.
3. University of Oxford. Oxford, UK. Feb 2018. Invited by Dan Oltenu. (tweet)
4. TU Dresden. Dresden, Germany. April 2018. Invited by Hannes Voigt.
5. Big Data Kompetenzzentrum Leipzig (ScaDS Dresden/Leipzig) Universität Leipzig. Leipzig, Germany. April 2018
6. Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. Marina del Rey, USA. May 2018. Invited by Mayank Kejriwal.
7. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Richland, Washington, USA. June 2018. Invited by Eric Stephan.
8. Ontology Engineering Group at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM). Madrid, Spain. July 2018. Invited by Oscar Corcho.
9. Free University of Bolzano. Bolzano, Italy. July 2018. Invited by Enrico Franconi.
10. Keynote for the 45th Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence Semantic Web and Ontology Conference. Tokyo, Japan. August 2018. Invited by Ryutaro Ichise and Patrik Schneider.
11. University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh, Scotland. Sept 2018. Invited by Leonid Libkin
12. University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Nuremberg, Germany. Sept 2018. Invited by Andreas Harth.
13. University of California – Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz, USA. Oct 2018. Invited by Phokion Kolaitis
14. Manipal Institute of Technology. Manipal, India. November 2018.

I deliver this talk wearing two hats: science and business. The goal of the talk is to provide an answer to the following question: Why is it so hard to deploy Semantic Web technologies in the real world?

I start by describing the research I did in my PhD and what was productized in Capsenta and continue to describe the status quo of data integration that we see in the real world. I share five observations that we have made when trying to use semantic web technologies to address data integration needs:

1. We are boiling the ocean because we want to create the ontology first.
2. Real world databases schemas are hard… really hard!
3. Real world mappings are hard… really hard!
4. Knowledge Hoarding
5. Tools are made for citizens of the Semantic City

I present ideas and solutions that we are working on at Capsenta to address these issues and bridge the chasm between the Semantic and Non-Semantic cities. Essentially, we need Knowledge Engineers, who need to be empowered with methodologies and tools. A final call to arms is made: we need to study the social-technical aspects of data integration.

A theme throughout the talk is that we need to know our history. Too much wheel reinventing is going on.

It has been a true honor to have the opportunity to give this talk so many times in 2018. I want to thank everybody who invited me, who listened to the talk, asked questions and fostered discussions. I’m extremely lucky to have had so many enlightening discussions which have sparked new research-industry collaborations. 2019 is going to be very exciting!

Without further adieu, here is a recording of the talk at KMI in Feb 2018