Written by Scott Koegler
This From-the-Top interview is with Prof. Dr. Angele Jürgen, Co-founder and CTO of Ontoprise GmbH.
SR: What is the current focus of your company's business?
Jürgen: The focus of our business is to provide mature and industry-proven Semantic Web infrastructure technologies like reasoners, ontology modeling environments, etc. to our partners and clients. Our partners create complete semantic solutions or enhance their own existing products with these technologies or directly apply our products within their customer projects. In this way, we are aiming to expand our excellent positioning as a technology and market leader.
SR: How has this focus changed in the last 2 years?
Jürgen: Having successfully implemented several projects in the industry ourselves, we noticed that an increased growth can only be achieved with a strong partner base. Thus, doing business with and via our partners became the focal point of our ambitions. We are very proud that we successfully have set up several solid and working partnerships already.
SR: What are your current initiatives?
Jürgen: From a technical point of view the “marriage” of the two different logical frameworks OWL and F-logic /Rules is the key development initiative we are undertaking, combining the advantages of both approaches. Beside that, we just started a service initiative around Semantic MediaWiki. The combination of our quality-approved distribution of Semantic MediaWiki, a set of powerful extensions for the productive use of SMW, and our high-level services is the perfect starting point for companies to introduce and operate Semantic MediaWiki in their organizations.
SR: How has the market for semantic technology changed over the last year?
Jürgen: Up to now, early adopters apply our products in productive environments. In the last year, semantic technology became more and more aware in the industry. For instance, the rate of participants from the industry at the Semtech conference in San Jose has grown strongly and there was a great atmosphere of departure. So you got the feeling that corporate Semantic Web really starts to take off, which is backed by the growing number of customers for ontoprise. What are the greatest challenges to adopting and implementing semantic technology for your customers? The challenge is to bring a new, innovative and complex technology into the mindset of the customers. Similar to database technology 30 years ago, it is a complex technology and customers have to understand the huge possibilities you gain with that technology. Furthermore, it is always important to give the customer a realistic picture of benefit from semantics.
SR: How are you helping your customers address these challenges?
Jürgen: Basically, by delivering mature and complete products focusing on real-life business needs and by showing our customers industrial references which have proven that the value is greater than the challenges. What do you believe to be the greatest contribution semantic technology will make? Semantic technologies allow us to unleash logics from applications and to bring it to a more abstract and flexible layer. This allows complex things to be described more easily and in an understandable way not only for the IT experts, and that increases the flexibility.
SR: Describe your company's position in the industry with regard to the solutions you deliver.
Jürgen: Looking at our history, our experiences and our customers, we can truly claim to provide mature and industry-proven Semantic Web infrastructure technologies. By that, we are delivering the core backbone to the SemanticWeb, setting standards together with our partners and clients. For example, we are the only company worldwide with a reasoner for both logical frameworks: OWL and F-logic/Rules.
SR: What do you believe to be the state of the industry in terms of growth, maturity, and availability of viable products to address the needs of implementers of semantic technology?
Jürgen: The market is on one hand still in an innovative state – compared to the huge possibilities of semantic technologies in general. One the other hand, we have several customers using ontologies successfully to improve their processes. Kuka Robot, one of the world’s largest suppliers of industrial robots, has just rolled-out the second generation of Kuka.Expert to their service technicians worldwide after the productive use of the first implementation for approximately 3 years.
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Prof. Dr. Angele Jürgen is Co-founder and CTO of Ontoprise GmbH, a provider of semantic technologies. In 1994, he became a full professor in applied computer science at the University of Applied Sciences, Braunschweig, Gemany. From 1989 to 1994, he was a research and teaching assistant at the University of Karlsruhe, Institute AIFB. He did research on the execution of the knowledge acquisition and representation language KARL, which led to a Ph.D. (Dr. rer. pol.) from the University of Karlsruhe in 1993. From 1985 to 1989, he worked for the companies AEG, Konstanz, Germany, and SEMA GROUP, Ulm, Germany. He received the diploma degree in computer science in 1985 from the University of Karlsruhe. He published around 90 papers as books and journals, and as book, conference, and workshop contributions. Topics were about Semantic Web, semantic technologies, knowledge representation, and their practical applications. He is leading several research and commercial projects. He gave more than 55 courses at Berufsakademien, Fachhochschulen and Universities. Topics were about: Expert Systems, Software Engineering, World Wide Web, Database Systems, Digital Image Analysis, Computer Graphics, Mathematics. He supervised around 30 master theses and PhDs.
Source: www.semanticreport.com
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