I am co-founder and research director of Collibra, a venture capital-backed spin-off from the Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory (VUB STARLab) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. Based in Brussels, Collibra develops software solutions for business semantics management and semantic alignment in the extended enterprise.
I am also senior scientist at the VUB STARLab and lecturer at VUB. VUB STARLab is a center of excellence in semantic technology research. Main focus is on the Development of Ontology-Grounded Methods and Applications (a.k.a. DOGMA), and validating them to real-life situations in several national and European projects.
Currently, I explore the wave of challenges and opportunities between (i) bottom-line development and deployment of Collibra’s enterprise software for business semantics management; (ii) and blue sky web science within and beyond the thin walls of STARLab. I am particularly interested in the challenges of reconciling knowledge fragments that were captured within the cosmos of social applications, and consolidating them into solid and reusable semantic patterns.
“Any usable ontology is defined by its owning community, not by its developer.” Key “semantic” issues:
* How can goal-oriented knowledge-intensive communities (such as enterprises) be semantically modeled?
* How can these models help us predict common service goals and strategies ?
* How should communities co-evolve with their business semantics in order to fulfill their goals ?
* Why should they even bother ?
Along this line, I authored several publications in various books, international journals and conferences, amongst which I co-edited a Springer book entitled Ontology Management for the Semantic Web and Beyond. I also give master lectures in Database Theory, Analysis and Design of (Web) Information Systems, and open-standard Semantic Web languages regularly at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and occasionally at the University of Hasselt, Belgium.
During the Semantic Data Management workshop at the European Semantic Web Conference 2010 in Crete, my former supervisor and lab director Robert Meersman gave a talk with a fresh vision on how we should tackle the mass of (meta)data about communities (enterprises, business webs), people, and systems (incl. documents and media) and the links in between them with [...]
Collibra has acquired considerable co-funding in ACSI, a European FP7 research project worth 5 million Euro. ACSI stands for “Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation”. The coordinator is IBM Research Haifa, and the kick-off of the project will be held in June at their premises in Israel. Details of the international consortium are below.
ACSI will serve to dramatically reduce [...]
Posted in Collibra | Tagged acsi, fp7, research, soa |
(repost from here )
For their X-mas, we delivered a Metadata Governance and Architecture Roadmap to the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training. Frans Decuyper, CIO of the Flemish Ministry of Education made the following quote about our work:
“Collibra’s metadata roadmap has become a fantastic tool and a bible for the Flemish Ministry of Education’s metadata initiatives [...]
…or to be more precise “Rene Magritte flirting with semiotics”. I spent my lazy Sunday (according to my sense of the word) at the new Rene Magritte Museum in Brussels (not to be confused with his birthplace house which is also a smaller museum about his life).
Magritte went through various phases of “his” interpretation of [...]
Everybody knows the Pizza Ontology that has been used for ages now to demonstrate tools and methods in the Semantic Web community. Nowadays the Beer Ontology is gaining interest, and I wonder how many concept types the Belgian beer namespace will consist, as there is no clear enumeration of that Anyway, when talking about [...]
As been said and written: ontology evolution/engineering can learn many things from its much older brother of software evolution/engineering. We substantiate this by making a comprehensive literature study on ontology evolution, and look where techniques and principles from software evolution could fit in.
Apart from the similarities, there are also divergent assumptions that must be taken [...]
The second-generation Web (2.0) is a complex socio-technical system of unforeseen growth and dynamics. On-line communities emerge and interact all around a usually self-organising manner supported by interactive applications, including bookmarking, tagging, blogging, and wikis, being developed and shared at little or no cost. The emerging range of Semantic Web and other open technologies promises [...]
While we (= Collibra) are warming up and working out our showcase for SemTech09 in June in the Valley, Tony Shaw invited us to write an article for his revamped Semantic Universe blog. You can find the whole article here.
Here is the summary: In today’s business ecosystems, information has become a competitive and [...]