™

Semantic Web @ BBN

Mike Deanmdean@bbn.com

Industry Track7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008)

Karlsruhe, Germany

29 October 2008

http://asio.bbn.com/2008/10/iswc2008/bbn-2008-10-29.ppt

™

2

Outline

History Current efforts Looking forward

™

Introduction to BBN

An advanced technology research and development firm, specializing in Information, Computer, and Physical Sciences

Known for technical excellence and challenging conventions to provide new and fundamentally better solutions to complex technical problems

Providing innovative, real-world solutions and satisfying our customers have been the keys to our success for 60 years

Staff of ~700 professionals– 2/3 hold advanced degrees

Principal offices in Cambridge, MA and the Washington, DC area

3

™

History of Innovation

1950s

Acoustic Design for UN General Assembly Hall

AI Pattern Recognition

Program

1960s

1st Time Sharing Demonstration

LOGO Programming

Language

ARPANET-First Multi-node Packet Switched Network

1970s

1st Person-to-Person Network

Email

@ Sign for Email Addresses

Acoustic analysis of JFK

Assassination Tapes

Analysis of Nixon Watergate Tapes

First Symmetric Multi-processor

First TCP for UNIX

1980s

1st Electronic Mail

Defense Data Network

National Science Foundation

Network (NSFNET)

Natural Language Computer Interface

Intelligent Agents

SimNet

Collaboration Planning

Technology

Cronus Distributed Computing

Environment

1990s

Secure email for DoD

Multi-Gigabit Router

DARPA Information Assurance

Broadband Wireless Technology

Genetic Algorithm Scheduling Tools

Collaborative Planning for Desert

Storm

ATM Switch

40K Word Speech Recognition System

Logistics Anchor Desk deployed for

Bosnia

Safekeyper Certificate Management

Certification Authority Workstation (CAW)

2000s

Call Director Natural Language

Routing

Semantic Web – OWL, SWRL,

OWL-S

Asio tools forNet-Centric Data

Sharing and Enterprise Web

Services

Microthunder Urban

Environment Surveillance 

System

Cognitive Agent Architecture -

Cougaar

Boomerang Acoustic Shooter Detection System

Quantum Cryptographic

Network

™

Core Technical Expertise

Data Mining and Knowledge Management– Semantic Web, Advanced Database Technologies, Audio Indexing, Information extraction from

speech and text Information Security

– Computer and network system architecture, information operations, cyber situation awareness, red teaming

Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing– Real-time, large vocabulary, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition, Advanced

speech-to-text systems, Audio monitoring and audio indexing, Speech-to-speech translation, Optical character recognition

Intelligent Systems– Genetic algorithms, Agent architectures, Cognitive systems

Advanced Networking– Wireless, ad hoc networks, High performance routers and encryptors, Satellite technology and

security, Low power networks Infrastructure Security

– Large scale intelligent sensor networks, Unmanned surveillance Physical Systems

– Acoustic and seismic sensing and analysis systems and technologies Real-Time Embedded Computing

– High performance operational systems, Signal processing and analysis

5

™

DAML

BBN was the Integration and Transition Contractor for the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) program, 2000-2005– Coordinated the efforts of 25 research teams– Led the Joint US/EU ad hoc Agent Markup

Language Committee, participated in W3C RDF Core and Web Ontology Working Groups

– Developed a number of tools, data sets, and applications

– Maintained daml.org and SemWebCentral.org

6

™

SemWebCentral.org

Open source software repository based on GForge

145 projects, 854 users Still maintained at BBN Hardware and software

upgrade in progress

7

™

R&D

DAML was the first and last large US Semantic Web research program– The DARPA Director thought we were “done”

once OWL became a W3C Recommendation Smaller R&D efforts in other agencies Several DARPA “seedling” projects Our focus has shifted to applications using

the Semantic Web (explicitly or not)– Government and commercial

8

™

Data Integration

Many of our applications focus on some aspect of data integration– Diverse databases, web services– Co-reference resolution among incomplete data sets

• Which of 500 references to John Smith refer to the same person?

– Combining structured and unstructured information (RDF encoding of natural language processing output)

– Translation between ontologies using SWRL plays a key role in many of solutions

9

™

10

AsioTM

SOAP/

RESTWS

WSDL

WSDLOntology

OWL

Mapping Ontology

OWL

SWRL Rules

RDBMS

Domain Source Ontology

OWL

QueryDecomposition

Query: SPARQL1

2

4 Data Access

3 Generation ofSub Queries

6Query Result Set

5

Data Source Ontology

OWL

Data Source Ontology

OWL

Semantic BridgeDatabase

Semantic BridgeWeb Service

BackwardsRule Chaining

Snoggle

Parliament

Semantic Query Decomposition (SQD)

Semantic BridgeSPARQL Endpoint

Automapper

™

Open Source

Snoggle– SWRL editor for ontology translation

Parliament– Memory-mapped embedded triple store– Descended from DAML DB– More details in my SSWS 2008 talk– Will soon be released as open source on

SemWebCentral

11

™

Geospatial Semantics

Geospatial Semantic Web R&D program at NGA– Geospatial ontologies (including trade study)– Geospatial indexing of knowledge bases– Semantic annotation of georegistered imagery

Active participation in– Spatial Ontology Community of Practice

(SOCoP)– Terra Cognita workshop series– US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF)

12

™

Going Forward

Growing business area

“Digital Whitewater” (information deluge)– Video annotation– Active and streaming

content Hope for resurgence

in US Semantic Web R&D with the new administration

13

™

More Information

asio.bbn.com snoggle.projects.semwebcentral.org parliament.projects.semwebcentral.org

14