Franz’s CEO, Jans Aasman to Present at SemTechBiz ‘13

OAKLAND, Calif. — March 12, 2013 — Franz Inc.’s CEO, Dr. Jans Aasman, will have two presentations at the June Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco.   The Semantic Technology & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) brings together today’s industry thought leaders and practitioners to explore the challenges and opportunities jointly impacting both corporate business leaders and technologists. Attendees benefit from this unique opportunity to explore how semantic solutions and linked data are being embraced throughout companies across a diverse range of business categories.

Real-Time Graph Search for Corporate Risk Mitigation

The management of partner relationships and the associated legal agreements for large projects continues to escalate in complexity. Currently, legal/risk experts have no tools to detect, monitor and manage risk that match this exploding complexity, velocity and data.

For example, contracts utilized for infrastructure construction represent some of the most complex of contracts and carries with them the successful creation of a bridge or a new multi-story building. With sub-contractors in the hundreds and the associated contracts to define how the project will be constructed in the 1000s of pages, the ability of a project manager to constantly be aware of impending risks, defaults, substantial potential litigation and damages has become virtually unmanageable.

Decomposing these complex relationships, via graph technologies, into discrete components and linking these components to relevant content, inside and outside of a corporation promises to facilitate real-time automatic calculation of risk, flagging of non-compliance and improve situational monitoring of projects.

In this presentation we discuss the graph based technologies that facilitate the ability to:

• identify contractual risk in real-time
• connect the adverse events with contract terms
• improve process flow and improve on lessons learned

Semantic Indexing of Unstructured Documents Using Taxonomies and Ontologies

Life Science and Healthcare organizations use RDF/SKOS/OWL based vocabularies, thesauri, taxonomies and ontologies to organize enterprise knowledge. There are many ways to use these technologies but one that is gaining momentum is to semantically index unstructured documents through ontologies and taxonomies.

In this talk we will demonstrate two projects where we use a combination of SKOS/OWL based taxonomies and ontologies, entity extraction, fast text search, and Graph Search to create a semantic retrieval engine for unstructured documents.

The first project organized all science related artifacts in Malaysia through a taxonomy of scientific concepts. It indexed all papers, people, patents, organizations, research grants, etc, etc, and created a user friendly taxonomy browser to quickly find relevant information, such as, “How much research funding has been spent on a certain subject over the last 3 years and how many patents resulted from this research”.

The second project discusses a large socio-economic content publisher that has millions of documents in at least eight different languages. Reusing documents for new publications was a painful process given that keyword search and LSI techniques were mostly inadequate to find the document fragments that were needed. Fortunately the organization had begun developing a large SKOS based taxonomy that linked common concepts to various preferential and alternative labels in many languages. We used this taxonomy to index millions of document fragments and we’ll show how we can perform relevancy search and retrieval based on taxonomic concepts.

About Dr. Aasman

Jans Aasman started his career as an experimental and cognitive psychologist, earning his PhD in cognitive science with a detailed model of car driver behavior using Lisp and Soar. He has spent most of his professional life in telecommunications research, specializing in intelligent user interfaces and applied artificial intelligence projects. From 1995 to 2004, he was also a part-time professor in the Industrial Design department of the Technical University of Delft. Jans is currently the CEO of Franz Inc., the leading supplier of commercial, persistent, and scalable RDF database products that provide the storage layer for powerful reasoning and ontology modeling capabilities for Semantic Web applications.

Accomplishments:

Dr. Aasman has gained notoriety as a conference speaker at such events as Semantic Technologies Conference, International Semantic Web Conference, Java One, Enterprise Data World, Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences, Linked Data Planet, INSA, GeoWeb, AAAI, NoSQLNow, Graph Data Management, RuleML, IEEE conferences, and DEBS to name a few.

About Franz Inc.

Franz’s semantic technology solutions help bring Web 3.0 ideas to reality. The company is the leading supplier of commercial, persistent and scalable Graph Database products. AllegroGraph is a high-performance database capable of storing and querying billions of RDF statements. The product provides solutions for customers to combine unstructured and structured data using W3C standard RDF for creating new Web 3.0 applications as well as identifying new opportunities for Business Intelligence in the Enterprise.  AllegroGraph’s Activity Recognition package provides a powerful means to aggregate and analyze data about individual and organizational behaviors, preferences, relationships, plus spatial and temporal linkages between individuals and groups. Franz customers include Fortune 500 companies in the government, life sciences and telecommunications industries. For more information, visit franz.com.

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