Semantic Technology Overview

Semantic technology is a software technology architected specifically to interpret, understand, and process the meaning of and associations between information at execution time. In order to understand information, semantic technology references a knowledge model which describes concepts that exist within a domain. This knowledge model can be extended to span many disciplines to enable the software technology to understanding data and information published by different project stakeholders from diverse domains. This is especially important when project stakeholders use different data formats and structures when publishing their data, and especially important to manage conflicts between the published data sets.

Semantic technology differs from conventional software applications since the meaning of concepts described in the model is established by the way they connect to each other rather than through inherited or local properties. In order to achieve this, semantic technology uses well defined vocabularies that express, among other properties, the equivalence between concepts in the knowledge base. As a result the knowledge model consists of a classification system describing the concepts that exist within a domain and statements describing how the concepts relate using vocabulary terms.

To make use of such a system for decision support, we implement a declarative rule system to express rules describing the behaviour of concepts in the knowledge model. This allows domain specific rules such as product design and costing rules to be expressed. When both the knowledge base and the rule set have been developed applications which are semantically enabled can process information as it emerges from project stakeholders, allowing business rules to be executed based on the most recent and up to date information.

At TechModal we recognised the importance of this approach in the defence sector where we developed the CostBuilder semantic application. When implemented, CostBuilder enables more accurate business decisions to be made earlier in the design phase by collecting, understanding and processing data from data sources distributed across multi-national teams. This is especially critical in domains utilising radically new product designs and services, especially with the increased use of advanced materials and emerging technologies. Here, uniquely, a declarative rule systems enables reuse and extension of the rule based knowledge allowing new systems and structures to evaluated faster and more efficiently.

Having researched the field of Semantic Technology at PhD level and implemented semantic technology applications in industry we have selected Ontoprise semantic technology as the most efficient framework on which to build semantic applications. In line with our background and experience we can save you a time and money in evaluating and implementing this specialised technology. If you are interested in our CostBuilder application or just interested in the field of semantic technology please feel free to contact the team at TechModal and we will be happy to discuss your needs. Alternatively, the following link provides interesting articles that describe the Core Concepts of Semantic Technology.