SEMANTICS: You are present with RDFox at this SEMANTiCS conference. Tell us a little more about the connection of RDFox to the main topic of the conference: Knowledge Graphs and Explainable AI.
Peter Crocker: RDFox was created with one goal in mind: to offer intelligent and comprehensive semantic reasoning capabilities to answer complex, real-world questions at the speeds required in industry. In deployment across the globe, this high-performance knowledge graph and reasoning engine is solving challenges faced by companies everywhere. Designed as an in-memory solution, RDFox is incredibly quick and regularly outperforms other graph databases—reducing load and query times by orders of magnitude. Beyond its phenomenal speed and depth of complexity, the deployment options for RDFox have been invaluable for the diverse needs of our clients. Deployable on everything from the cloud all the way down to mobile and edge devices, RDFox has an answer at any scale.
With advanced semantic reasoning you can build an intelligent system by implementing a hierarchy of rules and ontologies. Rules are used to encode domain expertise into a knowledge graph, allowing you to extract the knowledge buried in your data, answering functional, more valuable questions. Rules can be used to compute metrics, identify missing features, categorise behaviours, discover repeated patterns and highlight inconsistencies. What’s more, in RDFox this can be done in parallel and incrementally, ensuring the system is always consistent even with the addition of new information. RDFox is developed by Oxford Semantic Technologies (OST)—an Oxford University spin-out. Built upon robust engineering and pioneering algorithms born out or decades of cutting edge research, RDFox provides a shinning example of explainable AI. Every insight is explicitly provable via a chain of logic, and the methods behind the results are complete, visible, and verifiable.
SEMANTICS: Knowledge Graphs are rather abstract objects that are difficult to access by non-expert users.
Peter Crocker: RDFox is currently being used by our clients worldwide, providing solutions for start-ups and Fortune 500 companies alike. The unparalleled reasoning capabilities of RDFox position it perfectly to address many of the until-now-unsolved problems surrounding data in industry. It affords a newfound ability to ask business centred questions and retrieve insightful answers in return, all at speeds that are impossible without the innovative technology at the heart of RDFox. A prime example of the impact of RDFox can be seen in our implementation with one of the world’s largest industrial manufacturers—their use case: configuration management. By combining their catalogue of thousands of products and their properties with domain knowledge from their expert team, RDFox generates the world of possible solutions that they then sell to their clients. Powered by the speed of RDFox, users can configure, price and receive quotes though a simple interface. Demonstrating the versatility of RDFox is our use case with Samsung Research, applying graph and reasoning technology on mobile. By using RDFox to construct a personal knowledge graph that is stored in-memory on a user’s device, smartphone recommendations can be improved beyond measure. This supports search and content suggestions with intimate context about the users’ preferences while maintaining absolute security to mitigate privacy concerns. Of course, RDFox can and is being used in similar recommendation engines across a variety of sectors, assisting in ecommerce, publications, and other content management systems. That’s far from it in terms of RDFox deployment options. Together, our clients have produced numerous applications that have RDFox running on everything from the largest cloud instances to the smallest edge devices. Some of the most exciting examples of the latter include on medical devices for clinical decision support and in vehicles for real-time data integration and road environment modelling.
RDFox also provides powerful graph analytics capable of supporting complex analysis across vast reams of data. A global financial institution has created a solution with RDFox that facilitates anti-money laundering and fraud detection, dissecting deeply interconnected data to draw out insight. Fraudulent activity is identified using rules tailored to the specification of the institution which then leads to the isolation of recursive chains of suspicious individuals. These patterns more easily allow the involved parties to be tracked down and the root cause tackled. These are just a few of the applications of RDFox in use today. For a deeper dive into the breadth of use cases that leverage RDFox, our blog is a great place to look (https://www.oxfordsemantic.tech/blog). There you’ll find out all about our clients and how they’ve implemented RDFox to tackle some of the biggest challenges in their industries.
SEMANTICS: You are a sponsor of the conference. Where and how we can find you and talk to you?
Peter Crocker: The best place to catch us is at our booth! We’ll be there throughout the conference with more info about RDFox and we’re always happy to talk about the tech, a use case, or anything other questions you have.
We’ll also be speaking at a number of different sessions including ‘PoolParty, RDFox, and Semantic Reasoning—A Recipe for Success’ (Thu, 10:45, Session 4.1), and ‘The Global Knowledge Graph Market’ industry panel (Wed, 12:15, Session 2.1). For a lightning round on the cutting edge state of semantic reasoning and what can be achieved with true performance, ‘The Power in Performance: Cutting Edge Applications of Graph Reasoning with RDFox ’ (Thu, 14:30, Session 6.1) is a must-see! If instead you’d rather get stuck in and see its value first hand, our workshop ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Reasoning’ (Tue, 14:00, Room 6 afternoon) makes for a fantastic introduction to the tech.
As always you can find out more about RDFox and OST at our website (https://www.oxfordsemantic.tech/) and get your hands-on a free trial of RDFox (https://www.oxfordsemantic.tech/tryrdfoxforfree)! Download the latest version and see what you can create—we’re always here to help if you have any questions. You can contact us directly via our LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/oxford-semantic-technologies/), community slack channel (slack channel), or web form (https://www.oxfordsemantic.tech/contact).
See you in Vienna!
