Robert is since 2017 the CTO of the Semantic Web Company. Robert holds a degree in software engineering and has extensive professional experience in web technologies. He works at the intersection of software development and research, to assure the strategic development of product components using research results. In this interview, we talk about new PoolParty 7.0 release, how improvements cover market trends such as machine learning and AI as well as customers needs in data management.
PoolParty is a semantic technology platform provided by the Semantic Web Company, a pioneer in the semantic web since 2001. Industry leaders recognize PoolParty as one of the most advanced semantic middleware on the global market. Could you explain how organizations benefit from PoolParty and what are typical use cases?
PoolParty is a highly versatile application for knowledge management. It includes various features, from thesaurus and ontology management, content enrichment and semantic content analysis to machine learning features, like classification. By integrating a broad range of functionalities, we provide a powerful product family to support our customer’s business challenges. These include a lot of different use cases like data integration, semantic search, recommender systems or data catalogues.
You are the CTO of the Semantic Web Company and thus provide sound technical leadership in the company. Where do you see PoolParty heading to with the new product release? What are the main features included in PoolParty 7.0 and how will customers profit from them?
The new PoolParty 7.0 release supports the management of semantic knowledge graphs and linked data governance along the entire data lifecycle. This is a significant step towards supporting organizations in their various data management challenges. The main feature of the new release is PoolParty's GraphEditor, which allows for a most flexible data management. Customers can work with their data based not only on the SKOS model but based on any ontology they want to use to describe the data. Furthermore, the data can be stored in remote stores independently of the PoolParty instance, and by that, it provides a web-based remote editing feature. In general, we extended the support for remote data management. Customers can work in a distributed infrastructure of installations based on their needs. This offers more flexibility from an architectural point of view and makes PoolParty a more powerful semantic middleware. We also have a new advanced DBpedia linking that disambiguates labels based on the context in the thesaurus. It is available for linking concepts in thesaurus management, for retrieving information about extracted terms derived from text corpus analysis and for processing links using UnifiedViews. We reworked our custom scheme and ontology management to be more streamlined with other components from a UX perspective and therefore more convenient for ontology modeling. PoolParty 7.0 also includes several new features and improvements for security, e.g., improved application security based on OWASP.
What are the main technological trends and customer insights that triggered the improvements on PoolParty 7.0?
In general, we develop towards more flexibility in data management and modeling. Customer needs showed that we have to go beyond SKOS for data modeling. This requirement is now covered with the new GraphEditor feature, which will be further developed in the future. We also will continue to improve the enterprise readiness of our products, including enhanced security and scalability.
This year SEMANTiCS focuses on machine learning and AI applications. How does PoolParty position itself in this field?
We already showed that machine learning could benefit from semantic information. By bringing together symbolic and statistical AI, we can improve state-of-the-art machine learning approaches to give better results. This can be seen in PoolParty's classification component, which we were able to improve by enriching the model with thesaurus data. In PoolParty 7.0, we continue with Semantic AI by adding named entity recognition based on machine learning to the semantic extraction to provide a complete semantic view on the extracted content.
Which other technological trends do you see influencing PoolParty in the future? Do you have any strategic approach in this respect?
Semantic AI will remain a primary focus for the future. We want to make semantic data management, together with machine learning approaches, more accessible to users by providing features for data analysis and user guidance. The user should get a complete view of data management by providing integrated software components that cover all parts of the data lifecycle. This also includes content publishing and navigation and approaches for scalable big data processing. Finally, data quality is a main focus. Customers need to be able to ensure consistency for the data they work on. They also need to be able to check for quality issues based on specific constraints for their use cases.
You are a speaker at SEMANTiCS 2018. What’s the topic of your talk?
Data quality is exactly what the talk will focus on. We often encounter use cases where data consistency and quality is really important. Therefore we continue our research towards providing easy-to-use constraint checking for our software components. In this industry talk, we will show a demo of our new GraphEditor feature that is extended for integrated data validation based on W3C standards.
Discuss about data quality, the potential of SEMANTiC AI and PoolParty 7.0 in use with Robert at SEMANTiCS 2018. Register now!
About SEMANTiCS
The annual SEMANTiCS conference is the meeting place for professionals who make semantic computing work, and understand its benefits and know its limitations. Every year, SEMANTiCS attracts information managers, IT-architects, software engineers, and researchers, from organisations ranging from NPOs, universities, public administrations to the largest companies in the world. http://www.semantics.cc
