Semantic Application for

Digital Repositories

Fabrizio Gagliardi
EMEA & LATAM Director
Technical Computing
MSR External Research
Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Research’s Commitment to Science

Putting computing into science…

Applying Microsoft products and research technologies to advance
the scientific research and engineering innovation process

Putting science into computing…

Ensuring that research community requirements are factored into
future versions of Microsoft software

• Advancement of Science
• Global Collaboration
• Technology Excellence
• Interoperability
 myGrid

• Semantic relationships between different data

• Semantic descriptions of services
• Annotations
• Provenance
• Repositories
• Ontologies
 Research Output Repository Platform

Goals
• A platform for building services and tools for research
output repositories
• Papers, Videos, Presentations, Lectures,
References, Data, Code, etc.
• Relationships between stored entities
• Enable a tools and services ecosystem for “research UIs

output” repositories on MS technologies

Desktop
Search
Execution Research Tools
• Utilizing OAI-ORE, SWORD, and other output
community protocols repository
platform
• In development, deployment within MSR in early Q4
• Beta release to the community in late Q4
• Built on SQL Server 2008 + Entity Framework
Interop Syndication
• Using WPF and Silverlight for UI
 Research Output Repository Platform
Goals Non-goals
• Create a platform for building • A generic platform for asset
“research output” repositories management
• Engage with the digital library and • Support the lifecycle of publications
scholarly communications • Compete with existing repository
community solutions
• Become the “research output”
repository for MSR (RMCr project)
Services/tools
– Papers, Videos, Presentations, Lectures,
References, Data, Code, etc.
• Support an ecosystem of services and
tools
Microsoft.Famulus.Framework
• Available to the community for free
(we are still considering the open Microsoft.Famulus.Core
source route) (Based on the Entity Framework Model + extensions)

• Build an easy-to-install collection of SQL Server 2008, MS data storage technologies, Entity
basic services and tools Framework runtime
 Research Output Repository Platform

• A Semantic Computing platform

• A hybrid between a relational database and a triple store

Triple stores
-Evolution friendly Relational schema
-Poor performance -Evolution not so easy
-No need to model everything in advance -Great opportunities for optimization
-Semantic interpretation at the application level -Model everything in advance

Research Output Repository Platform

-Maintain a balance
-Try to model the frequently used entities in our app domain
-Try to capture the frequently used relationships
-Allow for extensibility (Relationships, Attributes)
 An intuitive programming experience

Person tony = new Person();

Publication pub1 = new Publication();
pub1.Title = "Title1";
Publication pub2 = new Publication();
pub2.Title = "Title2";

pub1.Cites.Add(pub2);
pub1.Authors.Add(tony);

Tag tag = new Tag();

tag.Name = "keyword";
pub1.Tags.Add(tag);
 Research Output Repository Platform

PDF file

Lecture on
is representation of contains 2/19/2008

PowerPoint
presentation

authored by
organized by
presented by

tony

Elizabeth, Sebastien,
Matthew, Norman,
Brian, Sarah, George, Roy
An Ecosystem of Research Repositories
Support of harvesting & federation
to/from Institutional Repositories
- arXiv.org
- DSpace
- ePrints
- Fedora
- etc.

Entities + Relationships can be synched

to cloud storage so that they are:
- Always Available
- Sharable
- Mixable
- Harvestable

Researchers manage their personal research entities

(data, citations, documents, workflows, etc.)
 Current Project Status

• Limit Tech Preview release due June 2008

• Public Beta targeted for Aug/Sept 2008

For more details

– Contact:
• Alex Wade (Program Manager) / [email protected]
– Community Forum:
• http://community.research.microsoft.com/forums/90.aspx
eScience and Semantic Computing
meet the Cloud
The cyberinfrastructure for the next
generation of researchers
 The Future: Software plus Services for Science?

• Expect scientific research environments will follow

similar trends to the commercial sector
– Leverage computing and data storage in the cloud
– Scientists already experimenting with Amazon S3 and EC2
services, with mixed results;
• For many of the same reasons
– Siloed research teams, no resource sharing across labs
– High storage costs
– Low resource utilization
– Excess capacity
– High costs of reliably keeping machines up-to-date
– Little support for developers, system operators

12
 A smart cyberinfrastructure

• Collective intelligence
– If last.fm can recommend what song to broadcast to me
based on what my friends are listening to, why cannot the
cyberinfrastructure of the future recommend articles of
potential interest based on what the experts in the field
that I respect are reading?
– Already examples emerging but the process is manual
(Connotea, BioMedCentral Faculty of 1000 ...)
• Automatic correlation of scientific data
• Smart composition of services and functionality
• Cloud computing to aggregate, process, analyze and
visualize data
 A world where all data is linked…
• Data/information is inter-
connected through machine-
interpretable information (e.g.
paper X is about star Y)
• Social networks are a special case
of ‘data networks’

• Important/key considerations
– Formats or “well-known” representations
of data/information
– Pervasive access protocols are key (e.g.
HTTP)
– Data/information is uniquely identified
(e.g. URIs)
– Links/associations between
data/information

Attribution: Richard Cyganiak

 …and stored/processed/analyzed in the
cloud
visualization and
Vision of Future Research analysis services scholarly
communications
Environment with both domain-specific services search
Software + Services blogs &
books
citations
social networking

Reference instant
management messaging

Project identity
mail
management
notification

document store

storage/data
services
knowledge
compute
management
services
knowledge virtualization
discovery
Added slides
eScience
 Emergence of a New Research Paradigm?
• Thousand years ago – Experimental Science
– Description of natural phenomena
• Last few hundred years – Theoretical Science
– Newton’s Laws, Maxwell’s Equations…
• Last few decades – Computational Science 2
– Simulation of complex phenomena  . 
a 4G c2
 a    
• Today – eScience or Data-centric Science  
3 a2
– Unify theory, experiment, and simulation
– Using data exploration and data mining
• Data captured by instruments
• Data generated by simulations
• Data generated by sensor networks
– Scientists overwhelmed with data
– Computer Science and IT companies
have technologies that will help

(With thanks to Jim Gray)

 Today

Web users... Scientists...

• Generate content on the Web • Annotate, share, discover data
– Blogs, wikis, podcasts, videocasts, – Custom, standalone tools
etc.
• Form communities • Conferences, Journals
– Social networks, virtual worlds – Publication process is long,
subscriptions, discoverability issues
• Interact, collaborate, share • Collaborate on projects, exchange
– Instant messaging, web forums, ideas
content sites – Email, F2F meetings, video-
conferences
• Consume information and • Use workflow tools to compose
services services
– Search, annotate, syndicate – Domain-specific services/tools
 Data can be easily produced

http://ecrystals.chem.soton.ac.uk
Thanks to Jeremy Frey
 Data and services can be easily composed

Taverna Workflow
Compose services from the Web

SensorMap
Functionality: Map navigation
Data: sensor-generated temperature, video camera feed,
traffic feeds, etc.
 Data is easily accessible

With thanks to
Catharine van Ingen
 Data is easily shareable

Sloan Digital Sky Server/SkyServer

http://cas.sdss.org/dr5/en/
 Today…

storing computing
Computers are huge amounts
great tools for managing indexing
of data

For example, Google and Microsoft both have copies of the Web
for indexing purposes
 Tomorrow…

storing computing
Computers will still huge amounts
be great tools for managing indexing
of data

acquisition discovery

We would like
aggregation organization
computers to also of the world’s
help with the correlation analysis information
automatic
interpretation inference
Semantic Computing
 What is Semantic Computing?

• Set of concepts and technologies

– Data modeling
– Relationships
– Ontologies
– Machine learning (entity extraction)
– Inference, reasoning
– Data, information, knowledge…

Data Information Knowledge Intelligence Wisdom

Current technologies

Possibilities for innovation

 Semantics

• Term used to refer to the concept of “meaning”

• The linguistics, AI, Natural Language Processing,
etc. communities have been working on
“meaning” and ”knowledge” related technologies
for decades
• Pragmatic approach to Semantic Computing
– Emergence of a new breed of technologies to capture
meaning (RDF, OWL, etc.)
– Combine with the pervasiveness of the Web
community technologies such as folksonomies …
 A word about the “Semantic Web”
• The term is used to describe a set
of technologies used to represent
data, concepts, and their
relationships
– Become a buzzword like Web 2.0

• Prefer to use the term “Semantic

Computing” which is about
modeling data in ways that can
be automatically processed by
computers
 Semantic Computing

• Some efforts are driven by the traditional

“knowledge engineering” community
– Engaged in building well-controlled ontologies
– Important for domain-specific vocabularies with data
formats and relationships specific to a community
– Model does not easily scale to the Internet
• Some efforts are driven by the Web 2.0 community
– Focus on the pervasiveness of Web protocols/standards
– Emphasis on microformats (small, flexible, embeddable
structures)
– Exploit evolving and ever-expanding vocabularies such as
folksonomies and tag clouds