Franz’s CEO, Jans Aasman to Present at Taxonomy Boot Camp in Washington DC

OAKLAND, Calif. — November 3, 2014 — Franz Inc.’s CEO, Dr. Jans Aasman, will present at the Taxonomy Boot Camp Conference this November in Washington DC. Taxonomy Boot Camp brings together practitioners and experts in taxonomy, vendors who have created tools to help manage your taxonomies, and novices who are starting out in the world of information management.

Semantic Indexing of Unstructured Documents Using Taxonomies & Ontologies

Life science companies 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. This talk discusses two use cases and demonstrates two projects using 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., 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 during the last 3 years and how many patents resulted from this research?” The second project involved a large socioeconomic 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. This taxonomy indexed millions of document fragments, and the speaker shows how to 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 www.franz.com.

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