National Semantic Technology Roadmap (Version 1.0)

The National Semantic Technology Roadmap (also known as the Ultimate Semantic Technology), depicted in Figure 6.1, is divided into the following sub-sections:

• Semantic Knowledge Representation and Reasoning,
• Semantic Multi-Agent Systems,
• Semantic Infrastructure,
• Intelligent User Interface,
• Semantic Visualization,
• Multimodal Understanding,
• Semantic User Experience,
• World-Wide Semantic Web, and
• Semantic Knowledge Discovery.

[ Download the National Semantic Technology Roadmap document here (PDF, external link) ]

______________________________________

What is Semantic Technology?

Semantic technology encodes meanings separately from data and content files, and separately from application code.

This enables machines as well as people to understand, share and reason with them at execution time. With semantic technologies, adding, changing and implementing new relationships or
interconnecting programs in a different way can be just as simple as changing the external model that these programs share.

With traditional information technology, on the other hand, meanings and relationships must be predefined and “hard wired” into data formats and the application program code at design time. This
means that when something changes, previously unexchanged information needs to be exchanged, or two programs need to interoperate in a new way, the humans must get involved.

Off-line, the parties must define and communicate between them the knowledge needed to make the change, and then recode the data structures and program logic to accommodate it, and then apply
these changes to the database and the application. Then, and only then, can they implement the changes.

Semantic technologies are “meaning-centered.” They include tools for:

• auto-recognition of topics and concepts,
• information and meaning extraction, and
• categorization.

Given a question, semantic technologies can directly search topics, concepts, associations that span a vast number of sources.

Semantic technologies provide an abstraction layer above existing IT technologies that enables bridging and interconnection of data, content, and processes. Second, from the portal perspective,
semantic technologies can be thought of as a new level of depth that provides far more intelligent, capable, relevant, and responsive interaction than with information technologies alone.

 Print Friendly