......		Meeting Location: Emerging Enterprise Center at Foley Hoag the Bay Colony Corporate Center 1000 Winter Street, Suite 4000 (North Entrance) Waltham, MA  Meeting Time: 6:30 - 9:30 pm Meeting Cost: $25 public, $10 students and active military Register Online Map and Directions
	Tuesday, February 19, 2008 Communications/Networking - Spinning the Semantic Web Semantic Web - Ripe for Commercialization? Meeting Overview The concept of the Semantic Web was first introduced almost a decade ago by academicians such as Tim Berners-Lee of MIT and Ken Baclawski of Northeastern University.  Their vision was search technologies that would improve retrieval both on the Internet and within the enterprise, particularly in vertical domains such as the life sciences, financial services and telecom.  While the technical community has embraced the importance of improving search based on concepts, meaning and topical relationships, keyword searching and navigation of web sites using hierarchical taxonomies are still the norm on the Internet.  Even as top search vendors enrich their search engines to improve the relevancy of retrieved content, among the leaders Google, Yahoo/IBM, FAST, and Autonomy, none are yet noted for a terrific semantic search experience on the Web or in the enterprise.  Are there technical barriers or is a poor business model the reason for slow commercialization? At this EntreTech Forum session, we will delve into the status of the Semantic Web by addressing the following questions: Semantic Web Technology - what are the pros and cons of various technological approaches?  Are there issues such as standardization, and the creation and maintenance of ontologies that have slowed acceptance?  Are there enabling technologies still needed before major breakthroughs? What are investor and analyst views of the search market in general and in particular the role of semantically-based searching vs. other search technologies for both Internet and enterprise search?  Do they see an evolving market or a major commercial success story on the horizon? Are there semantic search applications commercialized and succeeding in the marketplace?  What is currently in the pipeline and being funded?  Where have the bottlenecks and failures occurred?  We'll seek some "war stories" and lessons to be learned from them. Is there a new way to position the Semantic Web and what can we expect in the short and long term for semantic search in the business arena? SPEAKERS Keynote Speaker:  Kenneth Baclawski – Associate Professor, Northeastern University Mieczyslaw M. Kokar – Associate Professor, Northeastern University Moderator: Lynda Moulton –  Analyst, Semantic Web and Enterprise Search - Gilbane Group Panelists: Stephen Walsh – VP Sales and Marketing, Easy Ask Adam Jackson – Senior Associate, Argo Global Capital Jeff Catlin –  CEO, Lexalytics Brandy King – Information Specialist, Children's Hospital Keynote Speakers: Kenneth Bacalawski – Associate Professor, Northeastern University Kenneth Bacalawski is an Associate Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University.  Professor Baclawski's primary research area is ontology based computing.  This includes research in the Semantic Web, ontology-based methods in the health sciences, and methods for decision making in the presence of uncertainty.  Professor Baclawski holds 11 patents and has authored over 80 refereed publications in such journals and conferences as the National Academy of Science, Information Systems, the International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, and the International Semantic Web Conference.  He has served on numerous peer review panels and program committees for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Association for Computing Machinery.  He serves as a consultant to companies and government laboratories, and has edited and written several books and research monographs, including "Ontologies for Bioinformatics" published by the MIT press, and "Introduction to Probability with R", published by Chapman and Hall. Mieczyslaw M. Kokar – Associate Professor, Northeastern University Professor Kokar is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston.  His technical research interests include Information Fusion, Ontology-Based Information Processing, Software Defined Radios, Self-Controlling Software and Modeling Languages.  In particular, he is interested in higher-level information fusion and situation awareness, ontology-based software radios, the specification and design of self-controlling software using the control theory metaphor, ontology development, ontological annotation of information, logical reasoning about OWL annotated information, consistency checking, formalization of the UML language, consistency checking of UML models vs. UML Metamodel and of UML Metamodel vs. MOF.  Dr. Kokar teaches various graduate courses in software engineering, formal methods and artificial intelligence.  He has an M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer systems engineering from Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland.  He is a senior member of the IEE and member of the ACM. More information about Professor Kokar can be found at his web site: http://www.ece.neu.edu/groups/scs/kokar Moderator: Lynda Moulton –  Analyst, Semantic Web and Enterprise Search - Gilbane Group Lynda Moulton is a consultant on information technologies and knowledge management, with over 30 years of experience developing and implementing technology-based solutions for managing enterprise content.  Following employment at Union Carbide Corporation and Arthur D. Little, in 1980 Ms. Moulton founded Comstow Information Services to develop database technology for enterprise content management, a software application, BiblioTech®.  Currently lead analyst for enterprise search for the Gilbane Group, she is also a leader in the Boston KM Forum.  She is widely published and a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars.  Her work products and affiliations can be seen at:  http://gilbane.com/search_blog and http://www.lwmtechnology.com Panelists: Stephen Walsh – VP Sales and Marketing, EasyAsk Stephen Walsh is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for EasyAsk, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Progress Software.  As Vice President at EasyAsk, Steve oversees EasyAsk sales and marketing strategy and execution.  Prior to joining Progress Software in 2007, Steve served as General Manager, Americas, for enterprise software vendor Enlight Inc.  While at Enlight, Steve developed and executed the company's direct and OEM sales and marketing strategy, increasing revenue by more than 400% prior to the companies acquisition in 2007 by German software vendor, Datango.  Prior to Enlight, Steve held senior sales and marketing positions at Fast Search and Transfer, an enterprise search firm, x.hlp, an enterprise software vendor, RM plc, Europe's largest supplier of technology to education, and 3M.  Steve's experience includes the successful launch of two European firm's US operations and the management of the global launch for two enterprise software platforms.  Steve holds a BS in Managerial and Administrative Studies from the Aston University Business School, UK, and a Post Graduate Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing, UK. Adam Jackson – Senior Associate, Argo Global Partners Adam Jackson is a Senior Associate at Argo Global Capital where he focuses on investment opportunities in the Web and Wireless space.  Prior to joining Argo Global Capital two and a half years ago, Adam worked at the Telos/Xacta Corporation reporting to the Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer developing browser based security solutions for the US Government.  Currently Adam focuses his efforts on investing in early stage web companies exhibiting high growth potential and significant barriers to entry.  Adam serves as a director on the board of WorkshopLive, Inc., the world's leading online provider of music education, and Knewco Inc., a provider of semantic web solutions to the life sciences. Adam is a graduate of Bentley College, having received a BS in Finance with a minor in Information Technology and Psychology. Jeff Catlin –  CEO, Lexalytics Jeff Catlin has over 15 years of experience in the fields of search, classification and text analytics products and services.  He has held technical, managerial and senior management positions within a variety of companies including Thomson Financial and Sovereign Hill Software. His roots go back to the earliest days of search on the Internet, where he worked on the development and scaling of the Infoseek search platform.  Prior to the formation of Lexalytics, Jeff acted as the General Manager for the unstructured data group of LightSpeed Software where he was responsible for sales, marketing and development efforts for the Knowledge Appliance and iFocus products.  Prior to joining LightSpeed, he was co-owner of PleasantStreet Technologies which produced a news-filtering product.  Jeff and his partner were able to build a viable business and sell PleasantStreet Technologies to Chiliad Publishing in the fall of 2001.  Jeff graduated from UMass Amherst with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1987, and then worked on the GPS navigation system during its development phase. Brandy King – Information Specialist, Children's Hospital Brandy King is the Information Specialist at the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston.  She is a graduate of Smith College (B.A.) and Simmons College (M.I.I.S.).  Ms. King is an active member of the Special Libraries Association and was the recipient of the 2005 SLA Innovation in Technology Award for the creation of a customized media effects ontology used for semantic searching.  She is also co-author of the forthcoming book Finding the Concept, Not Just the Word:  A Librarian's Guide to Ontologies and Semantics, due out Summer 2008.  Ms. King's current work is at The Center on Media and Child Health, which has created the first free online database of scientific research about the effects of entertainment media on children's physical, social and emotional health.  Citations have been gathered from 11 academic disciplines, semantically indexed, and made available to answer questions through a natural language search.  Because of this innovative search mechanism, CMCH's two main audiences -- researchers and parents -- can ask questions about media and health and learn what scientific research has shown, regardless of how much prior knowledge they have about the topic or which words they use to express their information need.
Lawrence C. Grumer | Tel: 617-325-9852 | e-Fax: 484-303-9852 | lgrumer@taacorp.com