Elisa Kendall, Partner at Thematix, and Mark Linehan of IBM Research have authored a proposed mapping of the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules (“SVBR”) to OWL2. The work is significant, insofar as a growing number of large businesses are increasingly relying on SVBR to describe their business processes.  The OWL version will simplify the process of description and provide a richer set of tools and, for the first time, an ability to reason over a business model to determine consistency and entailment. IBM is hosting the mapping, which is described at their site thusly: This paper proposes a mapping …

Elisa Kendall and Deborah McGuinness presented our perennial favorite at this year’s New York Semantic Technology & Business Conference: Ontology 101. As the title suggests, it is an introduction to the subject of ontology in computer science. It is very comprehensive, yet it has considerable depth as well and provides a number of “ah hah” moments as one moves through. This year’s presentation adds a good deal of material on actual implementations of semantic technologies by RPI and others. If you should like your own copy of the presentation, please contact us and let us know — we’re happy to …

[This article was originally published in Tnooz on August 1, 2012] A year ago, Google, Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo announced Schema.org: a taxonomy that would allow webpages to self-describe their content. This, it was hoped, would help produce more accurate, specific and relevant search engine results. Unfortunately, Schema.org does not support anything specific to hotels or other travel suppliers, so their ability to make the offerings explicit is very limited. Schema.org was nevertheless great news because using even the existing mark-up worked to elevate search engine optimization and yield a positive ROI (case study here). Last month, Google announced its semantically driven “knowledge graph” to provide …