Semantic Web: Technologies and Applications for the Real-World (tutorial)

The Semantic Web has now reached a level of maturity that allows large enterprises to adopt the technology. The standards landscape is increasingly well developed, with RDF and OWL already being W3C standard recommendations, and GRDDL, SPARQL and SAWSDL looking likely to follow shortly. There is also an increasing array of robust software products that use Semantic Web technology, which greatly assists with any implementations.

This tutorial will focus on three areas. Firstly, it will provide a brief introduction to the core Semantic Web standards, including RDF, OWL, SPARQL and SAWSDL. It will then provide a comprehensive survey of the many Semantic Web tools that are currently available. The final section and the primary component of the tutorial will describe several real world implementations of applications enabled by the Semantic Web technologies.

Examples of real world implementations will focus on specific examples selected from the domains of life sciences, health care, GIS, government, technology, and financial services. They will describe the use of Semantic Web technology to support a number of key capabilities including data integration, search, and analysis. The presenters will describe why Semantic Web technology was chosen for the implementations, and the resulting benefits including empirical observations and analysis when available. They will also highlight some of the valuable lessons and development patterns that were learnt while working on Semantic Web implementations.