Collibra Blog

Collibra was selected as one of the 19 SMEs to exhibit at ICT 2008 in Lyon. The ICT 2008 event presented Europe's priorities for ICT research, development and funding.

A host of leading personalities from the world of ICT looked at how Europe can lead the ICT agenda for the next decade. As a leading semantic technology start-up with strong academic and research roots, Collibra was selected as one of the 19 SMEs out of hundreds of applications to showcase its unique technology. Another proof that Collibra may very well take a leading role in the transformation of the technological, industrial and business landscapes surrounding information technology.

Update: according to information from the EC, almost 4500 delegates attended ICT 2008. Their website now hosts online video of the plenary sessions, and documents related to the networking sessions and the conference.

read the article here.

Going for full visibility, Collibra is sponsoring the international conference On The Move to Meaningful Internet Systems and Ubiquitous Computing (OTM), which this year took place across the Atlantic in Monterrey, Mexico, from 10-14 November. OTM is of special interest to researchers, but also some industry people seeking for solutions can be found here. The Collibra booth received considerable attention throughout the duration of the conference. For example, Richard Hull from IBM Watson research was interested in Collibra's technology as being complementary with his work on business artefacts and information-centric workflows. We also received attention from Frank Byrum, chief scientist of Earl research.

Next to the buzz at Collibra booth, we also talked publically both research- as business-wise. Our research director Pieter De Leenheer is one of the co-organisers of OTM as he co-chairs a workshop on Community-based Evolution of Knowledge-intensive Systems (COMBEK) together with Martin Hepp and Amit Sheth. COMBEK intends to transcend the current, narrow “ontology engineering” view on the change management of knowledge structures that is at the heart today’s knowledge-intensive systems. We will consider stakeholder communities as integral factors in the continuous evolution of the knowledge-intensive systems in which they collaborate. By bringing together researchers from different domains, COMBEK aims to advance research on a very broad spectrum of needs, opportunities, and solutions. COMBEK will be a forum for the discussion of next-generation knowledge-intensive systems and radically new approaches in knowledge evolution.

Collibra also gave a one-hour talk (slides here) and software demonstration at Terry Halpin's international workshop on Object-Role Modeling. The talk included an elaboration on various research issues in semantic integration, and how Collibra advances the state of the art with its business semantics management methodology and tools.

We are proud to be part of the ADM network, which boasts a mission to bring people from IT and people from business together, enabling them to share experiences and grow as professionals. ADM is quite active in this area, hosting highly interactive workshops and interesting conferences. They recently celebrated their 10 years of activity, an event which was attented by over 200 professionals in the field (pictures at their website). Collibra's member page can be found at this URL: http://www.adm.be/mem_detail.asp?ID=135.

Collibra is featured in the new Akademos, the informative magazine by Vrije Universiteit Brussel. It presents the reader with a brief background on what Collibra is offering, and how the spin-off came into existence. For the dutch-speaking among you, read more at the online version.

Professor Dr. Robert Meersman, Pieter De Leenheer and myself presented at our evening conference of the Belgium SAI network. The "Studiecentrum voor Automatische Informatieverwerking", or SAI for short, is the learning platform for all ICT professionals. SAI organizes evening conferences and workshops on a regular basis. SAI's main goals are:

• improving the interest in the field of information processing,
• realizing knowledge transfer and exchange of experience in information processing, and
• creating an informal network for the exchange of professional expertise and experience from practice in information processing.

Professor Meersman kicked off the talk with a broad overview on the why, what, where and how of semantics in general. Pieter continued with the how by explaining best practices and an agile methodological approach. I then showed briefly how semantics can be applied to solve real-world enterprise problems, such as interoperability in the extended enterprise.

Despite the fact that semantics is state of the art, and semantic technology is not well known in industry, we had an interested audience of about 30 professionals. We received interesting feedback and confirmation of the relevance of the issues semantic technology can tackle. A next step is the organization of a more in-depth workshop, where attendees can really tackle semantics hands-on, using Collibra's tangible solutions on their own business semantics.

Pieter De Leenheer gave an invited talk at the 32nd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference in the track of Engineering Semantic Agent Systems.

Research in ontology management has reached a certain level of maturity, however, there is still little  understanding of, and technological support for, the methodological  and evolutionary aspects of ontologies as resources. Yet these are  crucial in distributed and collaborative worlds such as the Semantic  Web, where ontologies and their communities of use naturally and  mutually co-evolve. Through a deep understanding of the real-time,  community-driven, evolution of so-called ontologies, a semantic  agent system can be made operationally relevant and sustainable over  long periods of time. Such a paradigm shift in knowledge-intensive and  community-driven systems  would affect knowledge  sharing and communication across diverse communities in business,  industry, and society. This talk gives an overview of the practical and theoretical challenges and limitations, and based on that introduce an ontological and methodological foundation for community evolution processes.

Back to back with the European Semantic Technology Conference (covered in a previous post), Vienna hosted the Future Internet Symposium, also organized by STI International, and chaired by John Domingue, Deputy Director at the Knowledge Media Institute and freshly elected president at STI. The Future Internet is recent research trend, originated in the Bled initiative, and aims at directing and aligning efforts towards the enormous information overload we will face on the next generation on the Internet. As a knowledge economy, Europe should play a leading role in this challenge. The symposium took place in the Museumsquartier in Vienna, Austria.

A general trend throughout the Symposium is the incredible growth of both structured and unstructured information on the Web, and how this will require new ways of working through it.

A few highlights:

• Michael Brodie,  Chief Scientist at Verizon, showed how the Internet is actually a Digital Universe, and stated that we should try to treat it as such, for instance by adopting holistic objectives for the design process. He presented some grand challenges ahead that need to be resolved for the next generation of the Internet.
• João de Silva, Director at the Network and Communication DG-INFSO of the EC, presented the challenges that are waiting around the corner, caused by the exponential growth of information on the Web and the speed of adoption of mobile technology. His presentation is a clear direction for both researchers and industry in the field.
• Our Research Director, Pieter De Leenheer, elaborated on semantic challenges and opportunities for the Internet of the future. He claims that the technological success of the Internet still could not avoid a rampant growth of isolated ontologies and a massive dump of unstructured legacy data, and how the next generation of the Internet requires a paradigm shift. He then illustrated how Collibra enables this paradigm shift, as well as how this relates to current research projects.

Pieter De Leenheer, our Research Director, and myself attended the second edition of the European Semantic Technology Conference, the European equivalent of the Semantic Technology Conference. The conference was held at the magnificent Palais Niederösterriech, in Vienna, Austria. Organized by STI International, the goal of the conference is to bring semantic technology to the spotlight, and show its value in applying it to todays information problems. The conference clearly showed the increased interest in semantic technology, combining tutorials, workshops with case studies and keynotes.

Some highlights:

• A broad overview on the field of semantic technology by Mills Davis from Project10X. He presented two years of Project10X analysis in the field, which is extensively described in their 700+ page research report. He demonstrated very clearly that there is a lot of opportunity in semantic technology, and that we are close to reaching mainstream adoption.
• Pieter De Leenheer gave an invited talk on a case study we performed during Collibra’s incubation period at STARLab. He demonstrated how we applied our approach to business semantics management in the field of human resource management. We received positive feedback, in particular on the business-friendly aspects in our approach. In Collibra, we strongly believe that the semantic alignment between stakeholders with different backgrounds is essential in the adoption and application of semantic technology. [slides?]
• The conference closed with a panel discussion (outline at ZDNet), with an impressive round-up. The discussion was moderated by Paul Miller (Talis), and held by Michael Brodie (Chief Scientist at Verizon), Richard Benjamins (Director of Technological Strategy at Telefónica), Peter F. Brown (Pensive), John Davies (Director of the Next Generation Web group at British Telecom and chairman of the conference), Marta Nagy-Rothengass (Head of Unit DG INFSO/G/5 at the European Commission), and Mark Greaves (Director of Knowledge Systems at Vulcan Capital). A general advice arising from the discussion was the need to convince customers with clear solutions to difficult problems (which is what we as Collibra provide). They also agreed on the opportunities in the field, and the growing adoption in industry.

Next stop: the Future Internet Symposium, where Collibra will present its challenges and opportunities for the Internet of the future.