Andreas Blumauer, co-founder and CEO Semantic Web Company talks about key trend ‘cognitive computing’, Poolparty as a cornerstone for cognitive computing solutions and Analytics and Recommender Systems based on Knowledge Graphs.
Key trend: Converging Artificial Intelligence methods and technologies
Semantic Web Company supports clients from various fields, ranging from media & entertainment, e-commerce, financial institutions over pharmaceutical industry to industry 4.0. In recent 12 to 18 months we have seen a strong uptake of combined technology approaches that embrace machine learning in combination with semantic web technologies. This development reminds us of what we have seen with the linking of NLP techniques to Semantic Web standards about 5 years ago. In the meantime numerous users and providers integrate all these technologies into one stack, which in many cases is labelled as ‘cognitive computing’. A new mega-trend is born! The market has finally started to perceive various AI methods as complementary rather than as competitive ones, and semantic web plays a central role: Machine learning algorithms benefit from linked data and better data quality in general. NLP methods go beyond document-centric search, and semantic knowledge graphs in return can be managed more cost-efficiently when exploiting machine learning and NLP.
Many Forbes Global 2000 companies have already started to encode one of their most important assets, which is their domain-specific knowledge as semantic knowledge graphs in order to provide digital services to their internal and external customers on top. When presented to the users as bots, smart recommender systems, or intelligent assistants, just to name a few, most of us will have no idea which technologies will be used under the hood. By 2020, spending on cognitive applications worldwide is expected to reach $47 billion (IDC Worldwide Semiannual Cognitive/Artificial Intelligence Systems Spending Guide, 2016), and I bet that in most cases semantic technologies play a crucial role.
PoolParty as a cornerstone for your cognitive computing solution
Enterprises around the globe use PoolParty to manage their data the semantic way. By that, business objects can be processed in a more meaningful way. They can be linked and related to each other, and entities can be extracted from all types of data silos to be classified automatically on-the-fly. Typical data models and silos like relational databases or document repositories get decomposed into smaller information chunks, and as a result users benefit from getting concrete answers and context information around their questions, rather than receiving lists of documents based on search terms. Information and data becomes actionable! More information: https://www.poolparty.biz/
Analytics and Recommender Systems based on Semantic Knowledge Graphs
Most of Semantic Web Company’s current customer projects and also research activities deal with (predictive) analytics solutions, which link structured to unstructured information. Another hot topic is about building highly precise recommender systems that go beyond ‘simple’ similarities between documents, as for example solutions that combine two products which fit together nicely.
Again, this increasing demand for smart information solutions can only be fulfilled when various AI disciplines are combined with each other. People working at SWC are not only highly skilled semantic web experts, but have also deep knowledge in machine learning, text mining or other disciplines strongly related to what is frequently called ‘data science’. Nevertheless, semantics is at the core of our business, which helps to build cognitive applications based on our customer’s domain knowledge instead of algorithms only, which cannot be managed by the actual subject matter experts.
SEMANTiCS brings communities together
SEMANTiCS conference reflects this trend in a sense that it brings communities together. Already over the past years more and more people from related disciplines have identified SEMANTiCS as a great place to discuss the before mentioned convergence of AI technologies. As an example, the ‘Data Science’ workshop held in Vienna two years ago (at SEMANTiCS 2015) has already initiated discussions like this and was a great success. This year’s event finally covers a large range use cases based on various AI technologies, nicely combined with Semantic Web technologies.
