Pragmatic applications of the Semantic Web using SemTalk

• Authors: Christian Fillies;Gay Wood-Albrecht;Frauke Weichhardt
• Venue: Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking - Special issue: The Semantic Web: an evolution for a revolution
• Year: 2003

The Semantic Web is a new layer of the Internet that enables semantic representation of the contents of existing Web pages. Using common ontologies, human users sketch out the most important facts in models that act as intelligent whiteboards. Once models are broadcasted to the Internet, new and intelligent search engines, "ambient" intelligent devices and agents will be able to exploit this knowledge network.SemTalk is designed to empower end-users to contribute to the Semantic Web by offering an easy-to use MS Visio- based graphical editor to create RDF-like schema and workflows. Since the modeled data is found by Microsoft's Office XP SmartTags, users benefit from the knowledge captured in such a 'Semantic Web' as a natural byproduct of their daily work with other Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel or Outlook.SemTalk has a graphically configurable meta model. It extends the functionality of the Visio modeling tool because users can easily configure Visio to conform to different modeling worlds such as Business Engineering and CASE methodologies. These diverse modeling views can also be applied to any other Visio drawings.This paper presents the following applied uses of this technology: • Department-wide information modeling at the Credit Suisse Bank. The main emphasis of this project was to linguistically standardize terms. Based on a common central glossary, local knowledge management teams developed specialized models for their decentralized departments. As part of the knowledge management process, local glossaries were continually integrated into a commonly shared model. • Data warehouse modeling for the AOK Berlin, a health insurance company. As part of establishing a data warehouse, there was a need to document the contents of the data warehouse such as cubes and reports. Initially this was done in a MS Word-document but documentation soon became hard to navigate through and staff were reluctant to keep data current. A distributed, decentralized modeling approach was undertaken to implement these cubes and reports locally by local process experts. • Business process management project: distributed process modeling of the Bausparkasse Deutscher Ring, a German financial institution, to create an industry-specific Semantic Web. Several groups of students from the Technical University FH Brandenburg explored how to develop and apply an industry-specific Semantic Web using business process modeling. • Knowledge Representation experiment performed at the ISWC2002 in Sardinia to create a graphical knowledge base of Semantic Web research presented at the conference.This paper is an extended version of our original WWW2002 paper. It includes a more detailed technical discussion of key issues such as interface engines as well as the addition of more practical examples of how this technology can be used.