Interviewing Brian Donnelly: "We solve the problem of letting business users ask questions of their data."
30.01.2009
Andreas Blumauer (Semantic Web Company) talked with Brian Donnelly about a new system on the market called "Semantic Discovery System", which helps to do sophisticated queries across existing datasets without any knowledge about SemWeb technologies. In this talk Brian also discusses why complex scripts or triple stores should not be exposed to the end-users anymore.
(...) "we aim squarely at business people with a tool as easy to use as Excel or Mind Manager" (...)
Andreas Blumauer: Brian, could you please explain in a few sentences what "Semantic Discovery System" (SDS) can do for your customers? What is the USP compared to similar products?
Brian Donnelly: SDS solves the problem of letting ordinary business users ask sophisticated questions of their corporate data without any need for programmers.
We let people leave the corporate data in situ, i.e. large Oracle databases stay where they are - there is no need for extraction and loading into a triple store. Similarly, we leave large collections of Excel files remain where they are and incorporate them into our Semantic Surface alongside Oracle without any transformation. Similarly for Microsoft project files or Web Services. A technical differentiator is that we have a major piece e of academically renowned query processor underpinning our engine, so we can do distributed queries performantly. A business differentiator is that we aim squarely at business people with a tool as easy to use as Excel or Mind Manager - there is zero need to know or care about OWL, SPARQL etc - this all happens transparently under the hood.
Andreas Blumauer: Your system, SDS is addressing one of the oldest problems in information management: putting together information and extracting meaningful relations between existing data. Why have you chosen the "semantic web" as a framework to do so, was it the only alternative when you started with your venture 8 years ago?
Brian Donnelly: After building one of the first EAI companies (Constellar, now sold to IBM) we gained a great deal of Data Integration expertise over the last 20 years. Moving on to Distributed Query Integration in Life Science (where it is a very *hard* problem) we were able to solve the engineering part of the problem with our KLEISLI distributed query processor and extended SQL language. However, that still left people with the task of writing SQL, and no amount of SQL *wizards* will ever solve the problem for business users. Now, but putting a Semantic layer of OWL and generated SPARQL on top of our engine, the user is able to ask any/many very sophisticated questions entirely by point and click. This is something people have talked about for years and never done. The proof is in the pudding when you see users at for example Glaxo point and click on two OWL concepts and (unknown to them) auto-generate a 6 table Oracle SQL join and retrieve the answers from multimillion row databases in a few seconds.
(...) business users give a hoot about OWL - they want simple queries (...)
Andreas Blumauer: SDS is a desktop application. How does it use data from the web, like DBpedia or other linked data sources?
Brian Donnely: We don't focus on this at the moment. We DO focus on Web Services and we deal with them just like any other data source.
Andreas Blumauer: How do you see the future of the desktop as part of the "cloud"?
Brian Donnely: At the moment we COMPLETELY automatically generate an OWL Network Graph for Oracle/RDBMS, Excel, MS project etc. We do not completely do that for Web Services - some programming is needed. But once that is done, the user desktop, and for example, Amazon via web services becomes contiguous.
Andreas Blumauer: Which people (or companies) are already using your tool?
Brian Donnely: GSK, Amgen, Servier, Cordoba Solutions, Brand Niemann of EPA etc.
Andreas Blumauer: Which knowledge do you need to be able to do so?
Brian Donnely: Very little - we have spent huge time making this a desktop downloadable use straight away product like Mind Manager.
Andreas Blumauer: Can you use it without Semantic Web specific knowledge?
Brian Donnely: Absolutely - none of our focus (Excel, MS project Manager etc) in business users give a hoot about OWL, SPARQL etc. They want simple queries.
Andreas Blumauer: Which role plays "Education & Training" in your marketing strategy?
Brian Donnely: None at the moment.
Andreas Blumauer: SDS provides a "graphical interface" to all the spreadsheets in one ́s system. From which point should an interested customer start to get a first idea how to use your tool on top of his existing spreadsheets?
Brian Donnely: You can quickly get the idea from this (www.insilicodiscovery.com).
When you download and install the product we provide a simple video on how to
connect your spreadsheets - it is nearly 100% automatic.
(...) I am struck by how much "tecchie" stuff is (...)
Andreas Blumauer: Brian, do you think that SDS is a "Semantic Web Killer Application"?
Brian Donnely: Well obviously I do, being a bit biased - I am struck by how much "tecchie" stuff is out there and how if you ask people - what can I do with Semantics right now, today, to solve what problem" you get a deafening silence or reference to lots of acronyms. We are a business focused group that have built a previous company to 70 Global 1000 customers and solved big problems. We are doing the same now and we solve the problem of letting business users ask questions of their data.
Final question: Can you think of any?
Brian Donnely: Not really, I am not being ungenerous but the whole community seems to be made up of people that want to tinker with D2RQ, write complex scripts, do strange
things with triple stores ... Our customers really dislike technology and IT - they want business problems solved. But I also had fruitful conversations with the folks at Clark Parsia, who are both expert in their domain and refreshingly friendly and helpful.
About Brian Donnelly
Brian has started, owned and operated his own companies since University days. After creating Constellar Corporation and, with a great team, pioneering much of EAI and ETL etc, he has moved on to be pioneer in the Semantic Web.
live demonstration of SDS
This screenshot is of a live demonstration of SDS querying breast cancer images
connecting over web services to an image server while simultaneously connecting
with Excel files and Oracle. It is also available to watch in a video or you can try it
out live: www.insilicodiscovery.com
