Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Optique starts!

Last week we were in Oslo for the kick-off meeting of Optique. For those that don't know yet, Optique [1] is the EU project that will be funding research for and the development of -ontop- for the next 4 years.
The objective of the project (in simpler words that those used in the brochures) is to use semantic technology, with focus on reasoning and OBDA, to create an integrated solution that companies can use to regain control of their data. The keyword here is Big Data, big in volume of course, but also in diversity and speed.

The basic idea is that RDF, Ontology and OBDA can allow companies to perform complex data integration tasks in cheaper ways and through methodologies that will allow them to continue growing in a controlled way.

The consoritium is made by a great bunch of bright people, which are very much eager to deliver the promised results.

On the academic side the consortium includes of course the Free University  of Bolzano, but also University of Athens, Oxford University, Technical University of Hamburg, University of Oslo and Sapienza University of Rome.

On the industrial side things are also very exciting. Working on the integration of results and making a real product out of the things academic do we will have FuildOps, and specialised in the Statoil use case we will also have DNV. And something very exciting about the industry side is that we will have Siemens and Statoil too as providers for use cases, consumers and evaluators of the technology developed within the project. In both cases we are talking abouta huge number of data sources and ridiculous volumes of data.

What is extremely exciting about all this is that -ontop- and Quest are going to be central in achieving all this goals, we are all betting on efficient query rewriting and efficient execution. Because of that, we are getting funding of course and thanks to that we already grew the team from 2 people actively developing -ontop- to 4 people, and we will grow to 5 or 6 very soon. More over, we started already focusing a lot in things related to usability in order to be able to integrate with the tools from FluidsOp and to be ready to start providing results in the first months. Things are moving fast, and will move even faster in 2013.

In conclusion,  things are going to get really exciting in the OBDA are, so stay tuned!

[1] http://optique.project.ifi.uio.no/ (temporal website)

Monday, November 12, 2012

ISWC Demo tomorrow

Hi all,

Tomorrow we have a demo during ISWC (6:30 pm). If you want to take a look at what Quest can do in "virtual RDF" mode, come and visit us! I'll also talk about the techniques we use, the performance we get and the plans for the future.

Don't forget to vote for us!

- Mariano