Johan De Smedt and Girts Niedra
CTO and business analyst at TenForce respectively ...

... will be presenting papers at the next European Semantic Technology Conference in Vienna (2-3 December 2009).
We are delighted with this opportunity to share our know-how on semantics with a broad and interested public.

Johan will talk about semantic modeling, illustrated by a business case to make all different aspects of the process crystal-clear.
Johan will demonstrate in a practical way and based on a real-life example how business problems can be solved by building a semantic model.

Taking the case of EUROVOC - a thesaurus covering all the fields of activity of the European Union across 25 languages - a working model is built to illustrate how semantic modeling can happen. TenForce developed a portal for this EUROVOC multilingual thesaurus that is maintained by the Thesaurus Management System of Mondeca. The solution is implemented as an extension of the W3C semantic web standard SKOS. SKOS is a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Web.
 

Girts’ talk will be on Linked PIM, short for Personal Information Management. The presentation details a vision that makes all your personal information – such as an address profile, CVs, due tasks, calendars, blogs and so on - accessible to cross-portal subscribers. This can be done with a Linked PIM architecture.

A PIM provider would then need only one point of entry to publish the sharable information to all the interested parties, the so-called PIM subscribers. Again an excellent example of how semantic technologies – as abstract as they might appear up to now – already create real-life solutions nowadays.