UK researchers tap semantic web for BI innovation

Semantic web technologies could make it easier for users to find relevant search results

Computer researchers at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) have been awarded nearly €400,000 (£327,000) in European Commission funding as part of a €4m project focused on developing a system for businesses combining semantic technologies with business intelligence.

The Combining and Uniting Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies (CUBIST) project is being led by SAP and promises to develop a platform that will enable business users to make better sense of the vast amount of data available to them through the web.

The semantic web has long been hailed as the next stage in development of the world wide web. It involves publishing web data in languages such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML) so that web pages can be made machine readable and therefore better understood by computer system.

The project will focus at the back end on pulling vast amounts of structured and unstructured information using RDF into triple store systems.

Semantic web technologies are particularly good at mining unstructured sources, such as blogs and wikis as well as office documents, according to senior lecturer in software engineering at SHU, Simon Andrews.

At the front end, the project is looking to develop “novel visual analytics” to provide business intelligence to non-technical end users.

In particular, it aims to explore an emerging semantic technology known as Formal Concept Analysis which displays objects to the user in a "concept lattice", which could make it easier for them to glean “novel new useful business intelligence”, said Andrews.

“Classic BI is not good at federating data from structured and unstructured sources whereas semantic technologies are all geared towards that goal,” he explained.

Andrews added that semantic technology is also perfect at “looking for hidden information”, whereas traditional BI tools are often let down by being too prescriptive in terms of what the user needs to query.

The funding for the project, which begins in October, was secured with the help of regional support network Enterprise Europe Yorkshire, from the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development.

The project could give a much-needed boost to proponents of semantic web development after the government announced plans to cut funding for the proposed Web Science Institute at Southampton University, which was to be headed up by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.