DBOnto: Bridging Databases and Ontologies
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Computer Science
Abstract
Sources of information and our dependence on them are increasing at a phenomenal rate. The most obvious example is the explosive growth and rapid evolution of the World Wide Web, but other projects in research, industry, healthcare and government also exhibit a critical dependence on the effective management and exploitation of large scale data. The kind of information available is also changing rapidly, and often includes unstructured and semi-structured data, streaming data, noisy and incomplete data, and linked datasets. Simultaneously dealing with the rapidly increasing size, complexity and heterogeneity of data presents a grand challenge for information systems research, and has created an urgent need for more capable information systems. Meeting this need will be critical to the UK's future competitiveness.
Information systems clearly have a key role to play in addressing these extremely complex problems, but they need to evolve to reflect the rapidly changing information landscape. This evolution is the basis for the emerging field of semantics-aware data management, which involves a synthesis of ontological reasoning and database management principles. Semantics-aware systems employ rich schemas (AKA ontologies) that allow them to deal with incomplete and semi-structured information from heterogeneous sources, and to answer queries in a way that reflects both knowledge and data, i.e., to deliver understanding from information.
We believe, however, that if such systems are to be widely applicable, then their enhanced capabilities must, be in addition to, and not instead of, the well-established features and high performance of existing database systems; moreover, we believe that they will need to incorporate techniques from many other areas of computer science, particularly those that give a complementary view of ``Big Data'' management, such as algorithms and machine learning, stream processing, and information retrieval. The goal of the Oxford Information Systems Group (ISG) is to develop next generation semantics-aware data management systems that fully realise the desired synthesis.
ISG is uniquely positioned to realise such a synthesis: the group has world-leading expertise in both data management and ontology-based systems, an extensive network of contacts with information system users and data owners in the life sciences, government and industry, and is already tackling some of the most important and challenging scientific problems in the area. A platform grant would allow us to undertake the longer term, larger scale and more adventurous research that will be required in order to fully realise our ambitious goals, and at the same time offer an enhanced range of career development opportunities to our early-career researchers.
Platform funding would be used to provide stability and continuity for the existing PDRA team, and would help us to continue to attract and retain the most talented young researchers from around the world. It would also be used to develop new intra- and inter-disciplinary collaborations via support for research visits and short exploratory research projects, and to pursue new approaches to interaction with industry, building on and extending our established collaborations. The latter would include, e.g., the longer term embedding of PDRAs in industry, extending our research efforts beyond the traditional research prototype, specialising our tools for particular industries, and using them to test our research hypotheses in realistic industrial environments. Finally, platform funding would support extended outreach activities, including the development and delivery of tutorials, short courses, and a summer school.
Platform funding would thus enable us both to tackle a strategically important problem requiring a large team with a wide range of expertise, and to develop the careers of the next generation of research leaders.
Information systems clearly have a key role to play in addressing these extremely complex problems, but they need to evolve to reflect the rapidly changing information landscape. This evolution is the basis for the emerging field of semantics-aware data management, which involves a synthesis of ontological reasoning and database management principles. Semantics-aware systems employ rich schemas (AKA ontologies) that allow them to deal with incomplete and semi-structured information from heterogeneous sources, and to answer queries in a way that reflects both knowledge and data, i.e., to deliver understanding from information.
We believe, however, that if such systems are to be widely applicable, then their enhanced capabilities must, be in addition to, and not instead of, the well-established features and high performance of existing database systems; moreover, we believe that they will need to incorporate techniques from many other areas of computer science, particularly those that give a complementary view of ``Big Data'' management, such as algorithms and machine learning, stream processing, and information retrieval. The goal of the Oxford Information Systems Group (ISG) is to develop next generation semantics-aware data management systems that fully realise the desired synthesis.
ISG is uniquely positioned to realise such a synthesis: the group has world-leading expertise in both data management and ontology-based systems, an extensive network of contacts with information system users and data owners in the life sciences, government and industry, and is already tackling some of the most important and challenging scientific problems in the area. A platform grant would allow us to undertake the longer term, larger scale and more adventurous research that will be required in order to fully realise our ambitious goals, and at the same time offer an enhanced range of career development opportunities to our early-career researchers.
Platform funding would be used to provide stability and continuity for the existing PDRA team, and would help us to continue to attract and retain the most talented young researchers from around the world. It would also be used to develop new intra- and inter-disciplinary collaborations via support for research visits and short exploratory research projects, and to pursue new approaches to interaction with industry, building on and extending our established collaborations. The latter would include, e.g., the longer term embedding of PDRAs in industry, extending our research efforts beyond the traditional research prototype, specialising our tools for particular industries, and using them to test our research hypotheses in realistic industrial environments. Finally, platform funding would support extended outreach activities, including the development and delivery of tutorials, short courses, and a summer school.
Platform funding would thus enable us both to tackle a strategically important problem requiring a large team with a wide range of expertise, and to develop the careers of the next generation of research leaders.
Planned Impact
Data is rapidly becoming one of our most valuable resources, and its potential value is almost impossible to overestimate. Exploiting this potential will be critical to the UK's future competitiveness. We believe that our ability to do so will depend on information systems research, that we will be a major contributor to this research, and that the initiatives supported by platform funding will greatly magnify that contribution.
Our work will benefit both data owners struggling to manage heterogeneous information collections, and a growing subset of the technology industry for which improved information management capabilities represent an important component of their products or services.
Regarding data owners, the limitations of current data management and exploitation capabilities in the face of the data explosion are already widely recognised. We are already collaborating with many organisations who have sought our help in addressing this issue, including B2i, BAE Systems, the Data Strategy Board, Kaiser Permanente, the NHS, Ordnance Survey, Roke, Siemens, Statoil and Winton Capital (see letters of support). These collaborations cover application domains ranging from government and healthcare to the aerospace, energy and finance industries, and it is our belief that our research has the potential to impact almost every sector of the economy.
Regarding the technology industry, the needs of data owners have in turn made developing new information systems that address the rapid evoluation of customer data a great commercial opportunity. For example, Oracle has recently enhanced its well-known database management system with modules that use ontologies to support `semantic data management', and their brochure lists numerous application areas that can benefit from this technology. We are actively working with Oracle in the development of advanced information systems, as well as with numerous other technology vendors, including fluidOps, Google, IBM, liXto, Microsoft and Yahoo! (see letters of support).
Our contacts with industry will ensure that our work has immediate impact on and benefits for both developers and users of information systems. Our links with technology vendors will ensure rapid adoption of our results in their products; similarly, our links with data owners and consumers will ensure rapid adoption in their systems and applications. The industry internships supported by platform funding will both strengthen these links and facilitate technology transfer. The availability of and support for more robust prototypes will further facilitate technology transfer. Extending our collaborations with the developers and users of ontology-based systems in both academia and industry will also provide channels for dissemination, and opportunities for commercialising our results.
In order to maximise the impact of our research we will disseminate our results through distribution of software via the Web, presentations at relevant national and international meetings, participation in relevant international coordination and standardisation efforts, and publications in leading conferences and journals.
The proposers have an established impact track record: they have participated in numerous research projects, many of which have had significant impact on both research and industry, leading in several instances to exploitation of IP and/or commercial spin-offs; they have taken the lead in ensuring that ontology language standards are firmly based on foundational research; and they have been the recipients of several prestigious prizes and awards in recognition of their contributions to research.
Our work will benefit both data owners struggling to manage heterogeneous information collections, and a growing subset of the technology industry for which improved information management capabilities represent an important component of their products or services.
Regarding data owners, the limitations of current data management and exploitation capabilities in the face of the data explosion are already widely recognised. We are already collaborating with many organisations who have sought our help in addressing this issue, including B2i, BAE Systems, the Data Strategy Board, Kaiser Permanente, the NHS, Ordnance Survey, Roke, Siemens, Statoil and Winton Capital (see letters of support). These collaborations cover application domains ranging from government and healthcare to the aerospace, energy and finance industries, and it is our belief that our research has the potential to impact almost every sector of the economy.
Regarding the technology industry, the needs of data owners have in turn made developing new information systems that address the rapid evoluation of customer data a great commercial opportunity. For example, Oracle has recently enhanced its well-known database management system with modules that use ontologies to support `semantic data management', and their brochure lists numerous application areas that can benefit from this technology. We are actively working with Oracle in the development of advanced information systems, as well as with numerous other technology vendors, including fluidOps, Google, IBM, liXto, Microsoft and Yahoo! (see letters of support).
Our contacts with industry will ensure that our work has immediate impact on and benefits for both developers and users of information systems. Our links with technology vendors will ensure rapid adoption of our results in their products; similarly, our links with data owners and consumers will ensure rapid adoption in their systems and applications. The industry internships supported by platform funding will both strengthen these links and facilitate technology transfer. The availability of and support for more robust prototypes will further facilitate technology transfer. Extending our collaborations with the developers and users of ontology-based systems in both academia and industry will also provide channels for dissemination, and opportunities for commercialising our results.
In order to maximise the impact of our research we will disseminate our results through distribution of software via the Web, presentations at relevant national and international meetings, participation in relevant international coordination and standardisation efforts, and publications in leading conferences and journals.
The proposers have an established impact track record: they have participated in numerous research projects, many of which have had significant impact on both research and industry, leading in several instances to exploitation of IP and/or commercial spin-offs; they have taken the lead in ensuring that ontology language standards are firmly based on foundational research; and they have been the recipients of several prestigious prizes and awards in recognition of their contributions to research.
Organisations
- University of Oxford (Lead Research Organisation)
- European Institute for Energy Research (Collaboration)
- Federal Office for Defence Procurement Armasuisse (Collaboration)
- Oxford Semantic Technologies (Collaboration)
- University of Oslo (Collaboration)
- Logicblox (Collaboration)
- Bosch Group (Collaboration)
- Oracle Corporation (Collaboration)
- Siemens AG (Collaboration)
- Samsung (South Korea) (Collaboration)
- EDF Energy (United Kingdom) (Collaboration)
- Kaiser Permanente (Collaboration)
- Aibel AS (Collaboration)
Publications
Lukasiewicz T
(2020)
Explanations for Inconsistency-Tolerant Query Answering under Existential Rules
in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Lukasiewicz T
(2019)
Complexity results for preference aggregation over (m)CP-nets: Pareto and majority voting
in Artificial Intelligence
Lukasiewicz T
(2016)
On the Complexity of mCP-Nets
Lukasiewicz T
(2016)
Computational Models of Rationality
Lukasiewicz T
(2017)
Reasoning Web. Semantic Interoperability on the Web
Lukasiewicz T
(2019)
Complexity of Inconsistency-Tolerant Query Answering in Datalog+/- under Cardinality-Based Repairs
in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Lukasiewicz T
(2016)
Complexity of Threshold Query Answering in Probabilistic Ontological Data Exchange
Lukasiewicz T.
(2022)
Complexity of Inconsistency-Tolerant Query Answering in Datalog under Cardinality-Based Repairs
in CEUR Workshop Proceedings
Lukasiewicz T.
(2019)
Complexity of inconsistency-tolerant query answering in Datalog+/- Under cardinality-based repairs
in 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2019, 31st Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, IAAI 2019 and the 9th AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2019
Description | DBOnto has supported a wide range of activities across the research group, in particular collaborations with other leading research groups and industry partners. Some highlights include: The ongoing development of RDFox, an RDF triple store and parallel SWRL reasoner. RDFox has been used in several industry collaborations with, e.g., Armasuisse, EDF, EIFER, Kaiser Permanente, Oracle and Siemens. These collaborations have been critical in helping us to develop and evaluate RDFox. This work has recently led to the formation of two spin out companies, Covatic and Oxford Semantic Technologies, both of which will be exploiting RDFox technology. RDFox has been used in a collaborative project with the U.S. health care provider Kaiser Permanente. They funded a secondment for Robert Piro (one of our PDRAs) to work on data analysis in health care using RDFox, in particular computing benchmark measures which are issued by a U.S. government body for quality assurance. Accuracy of these measures is important as they are entry requirements for billing health care services against government funded schemes, such as Medicare which is the national insurance program for pensioners in the U.S. Thanks to Kaiser Permanente's involvement, RDFox could be evaluated on real patient data and compared to the current implementation. Our paper describing this work won a best paper prize at the leading semantic web conference ISWC, further collaboration with Kaiser is envisaged, and they are now discussing buying licences for RDFox. In another collaborative project, Evgeny Kharlamov and Ernesto Jimenez Ruiz have been working intensively with (and jointly funded by) Siemens on the problem of developing and maintaining conceptual models used for both data storage and the organisation of production processes in the engineering domain. They have been investigating how semantic tools developed in Oxford (mainly in earlier EPSRC funded projects) can be adapted for this purpose, and a toolkit that they are developing will be used in a trial deployment at Siemens. Our paper describing this work was also published at ISWC In addition to this work, we have also been investigating the use of ontology based data access to streamline the development and application of analytical procedures at Siemens. This led to a proposal for follow-on research that has now been jointly funded by EPSRC and Siemens (the ED3 project). Another of our industry collaborators is LogicBlox. Dan Olteanu has been collaborating with them on declarative meta-data management in the LogicBlox smart database management system, with currently scores of commercial applications. The system integrates handling of mixed transactional and analytical workloads, graph analyses, and predictive workloads that involve mathematical optimisation and machine learning, all expressed using a declarative datalog-like language. Dan's work, jointly with the LogicBlox runtime team, has been featured in two recent SIGMOD and VLDB publications co-authored by Dan. It has also led to Dan being awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant. Finally, Radu Ciucanu, a postdoc working with Dan Olteanu, was supported by DBOnto in his collaboration with the Toronto DB group led by Renée J. Miller on the iBench project (http://dblab.cs.toronto.edu/project/iBench/). iBench is a metadata generator that can be used to evaluate a wide-range of integration tasks, such as data exchange, mapping creation, mapping composition, and schema evolution. iBench permits control over the size and characteristics of the metadata that it generates (schemas, constraints, and mappings), and has been already successfully used for several empirical evaluations of data integration systems. iBench was presented in a VLDB'16 research paper and was also the basis of a VLDB'15 demonstration. |
Exploitation Route | Thanks to numerous collaborations with industry partners, including Armasuisse, EDF, EIFER, Kaiser Permanente, Oracle and Siemens, results of the project are already being put to use in practice. Moreover, technology developed in our RDFox triple store has been patented, and is now the basis for two spin-out companies: Covatic and Oxford Semantic Technologies. |
Sectors | Aerospace Defence and Marine Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Energy Financial Services and Management Consultancy Healthcare Manufacturing including Industrial Biotechology Retail |
URL | http://dbonto.cs.ox.ac.uk/ |
Description | In a collaboration with Kaiser Permanente (a US healthcare provider) we successfully evaluated our RDFox system for checking regulatory compliance based on Kaiser EPR datasets covering the Georgia region. The results revealed errors in Kaiser's reporting in respect of compliance with regulations concerning the care of government funded patients. This is very important for Kaiser, and they have applied for funding for a follow-on project to expand the scope of this work to cover the whole of their US patient base. In collaboration with Siemens we have adapted semantic technologies and tools developed in Oxford to create a toolkit for developing and maintaining conceptual models that Siemens use for both data storage and for the organisation of production processes in the engineering domain. The toolkit is being trialed at Siemens, and will be the subject of ongoing Siemens funded research and development. In a collaboration with LogicBlox, Inc we have helped to develop a a smart database management system that exploits ongoing Oxford research on the datalog language. The system has many commercial applications with LogicBlox customers, including many large retailers such as Home Depot, Toys R Us and Harods. There are now two spin-out companies (Covatic and Oxford Sematntic Technologies) that are exploiting our RDFox system and other semantic technologies developed by the Information Systems group. Oxford Semantic Technologies (OST) has raised GBP4,100,000 in investment, including GBP3,000,000 in Series A investment led by Samsung Ventures, announced in June 2019, and OST now employs 10 FTEs. OST's patented technology is sold under licence to customers for a fee of approximately GBP50,000 per licence. Since April 2018, the company has secured licence sales worth over GBP1,500,000. Customers include Festo, a German multinational production line equipment company, electronics giant Samsung, and several major financial services companies including Dow Jones and JP Morgan Chase. |
First Year Of Impact | 2016 |
Sector | Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Energy,Financial Services, and Management Consultancy,Healthcare,Manufacturing, including Industrial Biotechology,Retail |
Impact Types | Economic |
Description | Amazon Research Grant: Distributed Query Processing |
Amount | $10,287 (USD) |
Organisation | Amazon.com |
Sector | Private |
Country | United States |
Start | 01/2015 |
End | 02/2017 |
Description | ConCur: Knowledge Base Construction and Curation |
Amount | £1,131,073 (GBP) |
Funding ID | EP/V050869/1 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 12/2021 |
End | 11/2024 |
Description | Dynamic Processing of Frequently Asked Functional Aggregate Queries |
Amount | £94,042 (GBP) |
Organisation | Wiener-Anspach Foundation |
Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
Country | Belgium |
Start | 01/2017 |
End | 12/2019 |
Description | EPSRC ED3 |
Amount | £866,527 (GBP) |
Funding ID | EP/N014359/1 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 02/2016 |
End | 01/2019 |
Description | EPSRC Impact Acceleration Award (IAA) |
Amount | £58,647 (GBP) |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 03/2016 |
End | 03/2017 |
Description | Foundations of Factorised Data Management Systems |
Amount | € 1,980,966 (EUR) |
Funding ID | 682588 |
Organisation | European Research Council (ERC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | Belgium |
Start | 05/2016 |
End | 05/2021 |
Description | Google Research Award: Distributed Query Processing |
Amount | $66,763 (USD) |
Organisation | |
Sector | Private |
Country | United States |
Start | 07/2014 |
Description | KE Seed Fund Grant |
Amount | £3,000 (GBP) |
Organisation | University of Oxford |
Sector | Academic/University |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 01/2016 |
End | 01/2016 |
Description | Oracle External Research Office grant |
Amount | $95,000 (USD) |
Organisation | Oracle Corporation |
Sector | Private |
Country | United States |
Start | 03/2016 |
End | 03/2017 |
Description | PDQ: Proof-driven Query Planning |
Amount | £938,362 (GBP) |
Funding ID | EP/M005852/1 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 05/2015 |
End | 06/2020 |
Description | SIRIUS |
Amount | kr 216,018,000 (NOK) |
Funding ID | 237898/O30 |
Organisation | Research Council of Norway |
Sector | Public |
Country | Norway |
Start | 11/2015 |
End | 10/2023 |
Description | University of Oxford / Impact Acceleration Award |
Amount | £53,786 (GBP) |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 01/2016 |
End | 12/2016 |
Description | University of Oxford / Impact Acceleration Award |
Amount | £30,269 (GBP) |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 03/2015 |
End | 09/2015 |
Description | VADA |
Amount | £4,557,635 (GBP) |
Funding ID | EP/M025268/1 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 03/2015 |
End | 03/2020 |
Description | Aibel |
Organisation | Aibel AS |
Country | Norway |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | We have been working with Aibel to help them in enhancing their CAD and business process systems to use ontologies and other semantic technologies. |
Collaborator Contribution | Aibel have provided us with several interesting use cases and datasets, and they are now discussing funding some of our research. |
Impact | Aibel is using semantic technology to improve the design process for large infrastructure project such as North Sea oil and gas platforms. |
Start Year | 2016 |
Description | Armasuisse collaboration |
Organisation | Federal Office for Defence Procurement Armasuisse |
Country | Switzerland |
Sector | Public |
PI Contribution | We collaborated with Armasuisse on applying semantic technologies to the problem of detecting events on Twitter. The collaboration resulted in a paper that will be published at ESWC 2017. Apart from Armasuisse, the University of Fribourg also collaborated on the project as well; however, Armasuisse was the main project partner. |
Collaborator Contribution | Armasuisse provided the use case, the data for the evaluation, and the expertise in analysing Twitter time series data. Their contribution was crucial to getting the ESWC 2017 paper into shape. |
Impact | ESWC 2017 paper called "ArmaTweet: Detecting Events by Semantic Tweet Analysis". The paper is yet to be published, so the bibliographic details are not yet complete. |
Start Year | 2016 |
Description | Collaboration with Bosch |
Organisation | Bosch Group |
Department | Bosch |
Country | Germany |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | PhD research |
Collaborator Contribution | Real-life problems and funding for PhD student |
Impact | PhD funding |
Start Year | 2021 |
Description | Collaboration with Oxford Semantic Technologies |
Organisation | Oxford Semantic Technologies |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Testing and evaluation of RDFox graph DB |
Collaborator Contribution | RDFox licence and support |
Impact | Publications |
Start Year | 2017 |
Description | Collaboration with Samsung Research UK |
Organisation | Samsung |
Department | Samsung, UK |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Collaboration with Samsung Research UK |
Collaborator Contribution | Research problems and funding for PhD students and PDRAs |
Impact | Publications and funding |
Start Year | 2019 |
Description | Collaboration with Siemens |
Organisation | Siemens AG |
Country | Germany |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | PhD research |
Collaborator Contribution | Real-life problems and funding for PhD student |
Impact | PhD funding |
Start Year | 2019 |
Description | EDF ED3 |
Organisation | EDF Energy |
Department | EDF Innovation and Research |
Country | France |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Expertise in accessing distributed and heterogeneous data sources. |
Collaborator Contribution | Use cases, testing and evaluation in the electricity distribution domain. |
Impact | . |
Start Year | 2016 |
Description | EIFER |
Organisation | European Institute for Energy Research |
Country | Germany |
Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
PI Contribution | The Oxford Information Systems Group has providing knowledge and expertise in the area of Semantic Technologies, and has helped EIFER personnel to evaluate semantic technologies within their own projects. |
Collaborator Contribution | EIFER has provided domain expertise in the energy and the environment, and has helped us to evaluate research systems such as our RDFox triple store. |
Impact | Oxford organised a tutorial in Semantic Technologies for EIFER and several other industry partners. |
Start Year | 2016 |
Description | Kaiser Permanente DBOnto |
Organisation | Kaiser Permanente |
Country | United States |
Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
PI Contribution | Training of Kaiser personnel in the use of semantic technologies, the development of a semantic technology based prototype for checking compliance with government imposed clinical quality measures, and an evaluation of the prototype using EPR data from Kaiser's Giorgia region. |
Collaborator Contribution | Domain expertise, hosting an Oxford PDRA, provision of test data, and help in evaluation of the prototype. |
Impact | Prototype system and evaluation report. |
Start Year | 2014 |
Description | LogicBlox DBOnto & ED3 |
Organisation | Logicblox |
Country | United States |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Expertise in access to distributed and heterogeneous data sources. |
Collaborator Contribution | Use cases, testing and evaluation from their customer base in the retail domain, which includes Target, Home Depot, Walgreens and Toys R Us in the USA, Harods in the UK, and M-Video in Russia. |
Impact | Impact on Logicblox products, as well as joint research and publications, e.g., Todd J. Green, Dan Olteanu, Geoffrey Washburn: Live Programming in the LogicBlox System: A MetaLogiQL Approach. PVLDB 8(12): 1782-1793 (2015). |
Start Year | 2014 |
Description | Oracle |
Organisation | Oracle Corporation |
Department | Oracle Corporation UK Ltd |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Anthony Potter, a PhD student in the department, is working on distributed query answering algorithms. In 2015 he visited Oracle on a four-month internship. During the internship, Oracle has decided to implement Anthony's algorithm in their graph database. They also decided to support further research on semantic technologies through their External Researcher Programme. |
Collaborator Contribution | Oracle are supporting the research in semantic technologies with an unrestricted grant of $95k/year. |
Impact | Oracle implemented the distributed query answering algorithm in their system and is planning to use it in practice. |
Start Year | 2014 |
Description | Oracle DBOnto |
Organisation | Oracle Corporation |
Country | United States |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Expertise in semantic technologies, in particular in RDF and OWL reasoning. |
Collaborator Contribution | Access to Oracle products and to large scale computing facilities for testing and evaluation purposes. |
Impact | Several joint publications that include details of the testing work carried out at Oracle. |
Start Year | 2014 |
Description | SIRIUS |
Organisation | University of Oslo |
Department | SIRIUS Centre for Scalable Data Access |
Country | Norway |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | Expertise in semantic technology |
Collaborator Contribution | Funding students and postdoctoral researchers; access to use cases and industry partners in the Oil and Gas domain |
Impact | . |
Start Year | 2015 |
Description | Siemens DBOnto |
Organisation | Siemens AG |
Country | Germany |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Expertise in conceptual modelling and ontology engineering. |
Collaborator Contribution | Use cases in the engineering domain and access to domain experts and conceptual models for testing and evaluation purposes. |
Impact | A toolkit for managing conceptual models that is currently being tested and evaluated at Siemens. |
Start Year | 2013 |
Title | COMPLEX QUERY EVALUATION USING SIDEWAYS INFORMATION PASSING |
Description | A program stored on non-transitory computer-readable storage medium executes a method of evaluating a graph over a query. Decomposition instructions decompose the query into a plurality of subqueries. Evaluation instructions evaluate a subquery of the plurality of subqueries and generate a substitution multiset representing a result of the evaluation of the subquery. Filtration instructions or expansion instructions may operate upon the generated substitution set before passing the substitution set to a next subquery to be evaluated. The filtration instructions identify one or more mappings in the substitution multiset that cannot be safely passed to the second subquery and delete the identified one or more mappings from the substitution multiset. The expansion instructions determine, in a case where the subquery is operated upon by a non-distributive query operator, an expansion of the substitution multiset based at least on adding one or more new substitutions to the substitution multiset. |
IP Reference | US2022067042 |
Protection | Patent granted |
Year Protection Granted | 2022 |
Licensed | Yes |
Impact | Founding of Oxford Semantic Technologies |
Title | Parallel materialisation of a set of logical rules on a logical database |
Description | This invention concerns the materialisation of a set of logical rules on a logical database, such as a Resource Description Framework (RDF) database. More particularly, but not exclusively, the invention concerns computer-implemented methods of providing the materialisation of a set of logical rules on a logical database that are particularly amenable to parallel execution. The invention also concerns methods of storing data in computer memory when executing such methods. |
IP Reference | GB1319252.1 |
Protection | Patent application published |
Year Protection Granted | 2014 |
Licensed | No |
Impact | The technology described in this patent provides the foundation for RDFox -- a software system (listed as output of the MaSI3 grant) for scalable management of RDF data. The University and the PI recently started two spinout companies -- Covatic and Oxford Semantic Technologies -- whose goal is to further develop RDFox and use it in a commercial setting. Both companies are listed as outputs of the MaSI3 fellowship. |
Title | RDFox |
Description | RDFox is a highly scalable in-memory RDF triple store that supports shared memory parallel datalog reasoning. It is a cross-platform software written in C++ that comes with a Java wrapper allowing for an easy integration with any Java-based solution. |
Type Of Technology | Software |
Year Produced | 2014 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | There is a growing community of uses of this system, and companies such as EDF Energy in France are already using the system in a research setting. We hope to find industrial partners to license the system. |
URL | http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/isg/tools/RDFox/ |
Title | RDFox |
Description | Triple store / graph DB |
Type Of Technology | Software |
Year Produced | 2016 |
Impact | Basis for Covatic and OST spin-outs |
URL | https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/isg/tools/RDFox/ |
Company Name | Covatic |
Description | Covatic develops software that analyses a user's online engagement to deliver personalised advertising. |
Year Established | 2016 |
Impact | The company is just starting in February 2017, so there are no major impacts yet. However, the company has a partnership with ITN that will guide the development of the products. |
Website | https://covatic.com/ |
Company Name | Covatic |
Description | Covatic develops software that analyses a user's online engagement to deliver personalised advertising. |
Year Established | 2016 |
Impact | Although a new startup the company already has contracts with the BBC and with ITN. |
Website | https://covatic.com/ |
Company Name | Oxford Semantic Technologies |
Description | Oxford Semantic Technologies develops software that uses machine learning to analyse semantic data and its ontologies, which can be used when combining or ordering multiple datasets, and in simulating predictive relationships between data. |
Year Established | 2016 |
Impact | The company has only recently been established, but we are already in discussions with several large companies in the financial services sector who are interested in both data integration and compliance verification. |
Website | http://www.oxfordsemantic.tech |
Company Name | Oxford Semantic Technologies |
Description | Oxford Semantic Technologies develops software that uses machine learning to analyse semantic data and its ontologies, which can be used when combining or ordering multiple datasets, and in simulating predictive relationships between data. |
Year Established | 2016 |
Impact | The company has just started so it does not have major impacts yet. |
Website | http://www.oxfordsemantic.tech |
Description | Alan Turing Institute Workshop |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Workshop on Semantic Web and Data Integration: new technologies and applications to industry organised at the Alan Turing Institute in London. The goal of the workshop was to improve our understanding of the challenges faced by industry that are related to data and knowledge management and knowledge representation, particularly in the area of data integration and semantic web technologies. We also heard about new techniques that can be applied to these challenges, including a report on existing projects sponsored by Oxford's DBOnto project in these areas, several of which involve collaborations between industry and academic partners. Finally, we identified areas where more collaborative research is needed. The workshop was a 2-day event so as to allow time for presentations and demonstrations from industry participants as well as from academics. It was held on Thursday 26th and Friday 27th May 2016 at the Alan Turing Institute (headquartered within the British Library). |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
URL | http://dbonto.cs.ox.ac.uk/workshop16.html |
Description | Alibaba talk |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Invited presentation at the headquarters of Alibaba in Hangzhou, China |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | Computing Systems Research for Big Data (Alan Turing Institute) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | The workshop addressed the following research agenda: 1. Data centre systems architecture roadmap for 5-10 years out: if map/reduce is dead, what replaces it? 2. Programming paradigms for big data: what are the key primitives to empower data scientists? 3. Storage/Database paradigms for big data: how to make storage reliable, scalable and available. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
URL | https://www.turing.ac.uk/events/computing-systems-research-for-big-data/ |
Description | DBOnto kick-off workshop |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Workshop for industry partners presenting Information Systems Group research. Participants included Oracle, Siemens, IBM, FluidOperations, B2i healthcare, Roke, Facebook and the universities of Stanford, Rome (La Sapienza), Politecnico di Milan and FZI. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | http://dbonto.cs.ox.ac.uk/kickoff.html |
Description | Factorised Relational Databases (Google MapReduce Infrastructure Seminar, Mountain View, California) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Disseminating research in industry, making new contacts. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
Description | Factorised Relational Databases (Invited Keynote, Alberto Mendelzon Workshop, Lima) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Disseminating research. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
Description | Factorised Relational Databases (Pivotal Colloquium Series, Palo Alto, California) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Disseminating research in industry, making new contacts. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
Description | Factorized Databases: A Knowledge Compilation Perspective (Symposium on New Frontiers in Knowledge Compilation, Vienna.) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Disseminating research and establishing new professional connections. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
Description | Huawei talk |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Invited presentation at Huawei's annual Strategy and Technology Workshop hosted by Huawei Corporate Technology Strategy Department and Overseas Research Institutes at Huawei's Headquarter in Shenzhen, China. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | In-database learning of regression models (IBM Research, Almaden, California) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Disseminate research in industry. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | In-database learning of regression models (LogicBlox, Berkeley, California) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Disseminate research in industry. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
Description | In-database learning of regression models (Palantir Technology, Palo Alto, California) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Disseminate research in industry. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
Description | Industry discussion on semantic technologies at EDF Paris |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | We visited EDF (Electricite de France) Paris as a part of our ongoing collaboration in an Impact Acceleration Award. The visit included a small workshop with EDF members about semantic technologies and their applications to EDF use cases. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | Interviews on Romanian National Radio (Bucharest) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | There were a series of three interviews I gave on the Romanian national radio, where I talked about my research in Computer Science. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | Invited talk at Huawei research centre Edinburgh |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Invited talk at Huawei research centre Edinburgh |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
Description | Invited talk at IJCKG |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Invited talk at IJCKG |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://language-semantic.org/ijckg2021/ |
Description | Invited talk at K-CAP |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Invited talk at K-CAP |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://www.k-cap.org/2021/ |
Description | Invited talk at NeSY |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Invited talk at NeSY |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://sites.google.com/view/nesy20/home |
Description | Invited talk at ODSC |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Invited talk at ODSC |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
URL | https://odsc.com/dublin/schedule-overview/ |
Description | Invited talk at WEBIST |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Invited talk at WEBIST |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://webist.scitevents.org/?y=2021 |
Description | Invited talk in Chile |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
Results and Impact | Invited talk in the main seminar of Pontifical Catholic University of Chile's mathematics department. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | https://www.ing.uc.cl/ingenieria-matematica/7-seminario-ingenieria-matematica-2/ |
Description | Invited tutorial at workshop |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | I was invited to give a tutorial on query reformulation at the main summer school in Data Management, associated to the Alberto Mendelzon Workshop on Management of Data. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
Description | Keynote at conference in Lima, Peru |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Invited talk at SimBig18 in Lima, Peru |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
Description | Keynote at database workshop |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Keynote talk on query optimisation over web datasources at workshop on data management. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | https://users.dcc.uchile.cl/~jperez/amw2014/ |
Description | Keynote at main workshop on Description Logics |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Invited keynote on new approaches to query reformulation in databases at the main meeting for research in Description Logics (DL 2014). |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | https://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/dl2014/ |
Description | Keynote at workshop in Germany |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Keynote in workshop on logic |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
URL | http://2017.soqe.org/ |
Description | Keynote on data integration at database conference |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Keynote at the Web Age Information Management (WAIM) on data integration; WAIM is the main database conference in China. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
URL | http://www.cs.sdu.edu.cn/waim2015/ |
Description | Keynote speech at Database conference |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | I was the keynote speaker at one of the main conferences for database researchers, Principles of Database Systems (PODS). I gave an overview of work on reasoning within data management. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | https://sigmod2018.org/ |
Description | Keynote talk at Declarative AI conference |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Keynote at DeclarativeAI conference about our research and spin-out activities on knowledge graphs |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Keynote talk at LDAC conference |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Keynote at LDAC to present our research and spin-out activities on knowledge graphs |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Organization of Workshop on Ontologies and Data Management |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Lead and co-organizer of a workshop at the Dagstuhl center for computer science, Europe's leading venue for computer science seminars and workshops. The workshop dealt with the interface of data management, logic, and semantic web research, including researchers from each of these areas. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2014/4794/ |
Description | Oxford-EBI workshop |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Workshop with European Bioinformatics Institute to explore use of ontologies and other semantic technologies in bioinformatics. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | Presentation at Bosch research workshop |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Presentation at Bosch research workshop |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Presentation at Google Research, San Fancisco |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Presentation at Google Research, San Fancisco |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
Description | Presentation at Huawei |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Talk at Huawei to inform them about our research and spin-out activities on knowledge graphs |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Presentation at Samsung |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Talk at Samsung to inform them about our research and spin-out activities on knowledge graphs |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Presentation at Samsung Research, California |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Presentation at Samsung Research, California |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
Description | Presentation at Siemens Research, Munich |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Presentation at Siemens Research, Munich |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
Description | Presentation at eBay, California |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Presentation at eBay, California |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Presentation at eBay, California |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Presentation at eBay, California |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
Description | Probabilistic Databases and Reasoning (Invited tutorial, KR conference, Cape Town, South Africa) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Teaching and disseminating research, attracting new group members, establishing new connections. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
Description | Semantic Technology Tutorial |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | The goal of the tutorial is to provide a working knowledge of semantic technologies, ranging from background theory through to hands-on experience with state of the art tools and systems. The tutorial is part of Oxford's DBOnto project whose aim is to promote interaction with industry and other centres of excellence. The tutorial is a 5-day full time event with attendants from industry and academia. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
URL | http://dbonto.cs.ox.ac.uk/tutorial2017.html |
Description | Summer School Course |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | I gave a 1-week summer school course on the topic of this grant |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
URL | https://www.irit.fr/esslli2017/ |
Description | Summer school course on Logic and Data Management |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Presented a 1-week short course on logical issues in data management at one of the main european summer schools, the European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | http://www.evolaemp.uni-tuebingen.de/esslli2014/program/week-two/ |
Description | Talk in the Colloquium Polaris series in France |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | The Colloquium Polaris is the main research colloquium for Computer Science in Lille, serving both the French national research agencies and the University of Lille. The talk was an overview of data integration for an audience that mixed undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and researchers. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
URL | https://www.inria.fr/en/centre/lille/calendar/colloquium-polaris-michael-benedikt-semantic-access-an... |
Description | Taming Large Answers to Keyword Queries (Keynote at conference KEYNOTE, Cluj, Romania) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Disseminate research, attracted new members in research group. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |