Thank you for taking part in the
PoolParty Summit 2023

ALL THE RECORDED VIDEOS TO THE SUMMIT CAN BE FOUND HERE

Geared towards PoolParty users, partners, and the general semantic web community, the Summit allowed attendees to see how semantic technologies work in real-life use cases, from the hands of the people working directly with the software.

Across the 2 days of the Summit, we were happy to have over 1000 registrants, 20 different sessions, and 30+ speakers whose expertise ranged from various roles and industries.

DAY 1 – Optimizing Product Management Processes with 360-Degree Views

The first day of the PoolParty Summit 2023 kicked off with opening remarks from Semantic Web Company CEO Andreas Blumauer. Andreas highlighted the main themes of the Summit such as the new digital workplace, intelligent content, and ESG principles – where the remainder of the day highlighted these different topics.

The final session of the day included an all-female panel from leaders in tech and their unique perspectives.

Click on the individual videos below to check out these sessions!

Andreas Blumauer, CEO, Semantic Web Company, Founder of PoolParty

The PoolParty Summit 2023 was kicked off with the opening remarks from Semantic Web Company CEO Andreas Blumauer. He addresses the major themes of our Summit such as the new digital workplace, ESG initiatives, and how they can be managed successfully through Semantic AI.

Flavio Previtali, Knowledge Management Officer at Green Climate Fund

This presentation shows how the GCF used SWC services and licenses to build a system capable to provide information on projects throughout their whole life cycle, from submission to closure. With a step-by-step approach, they analyzed the initial conditions, GCF needs and how the tools were used to address them. Moreover, they explored where it was necessary to cooperate with in house ICT team to develop additional tools for analysis and display of tags.

Armin Friedl, Director of Software Engineering at Semantic Web Company.
Christian Blaschke, Product Owner at Semantic Web Company.

The PoolParty Product Owner and Director of Product Development gave a deep dive on the PoolParty 2022 Release. They shared information about improved security benefits, scalability features, UX improvements, and new ready-made integrations.

Robert David, Chief Innovation Officer at Semantic Web Company.
Patrice Neff, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder at Squirro.

In recent years, augmented intelligence systems have advanced to provide humans with insights for knowledge discovery and decision making. Using a cooperative approach, these systems use powerful artificial intelligence (AI) to augment human cognitive activities. To do so, the AI capabilities have to complement human actions and therefore be explainable and controllable, while still providing implicit insights based on statistical models. Semantic Artificial Intelligence (Semantic AI), as the combination of machine learning and knowledge models, provides such a methodology. In this industry presentation, the speakers demonstrated a Semantic AI system for augmented intelligence as an integration of two powerful AI platforms. Squirro, the Insight Engine for Cognitive Search and PoolParty, the most complete Semantic Middleware, combine on a methodological level to fuse knowledge graphs and machine learning capabilities into a unified functionality. They demonstrated how this approach can be applied to solve a smart assistant use case where we provide recommendations for emails. These recommendations are created using a combination of natural language processing (NLP), text classification, and a knowledge graph. This results in high-precision contextual information about email content, directly in the inbox. With this integration they bring a novel approach to augmented intelligence for an effective cooperation of humans and AI.

Carlos Arias, Senior Environmental Specialist at International Finance Corporation (IFC).
Blaise Sandwidi, Lead Data Scientist at International Finance Corporation (IFC).

MALENA (Machine Learning ESG Analyst) is an Artificial Intelligence model developed by IFC. MALENA uses Natural Language Processing techniques to identify environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk and analyze its significance. MALENA uses the IFC’s Performance Standards and Corporate Governance Methodology as a framework to support ESG data analytics. MALENA’s model converts unstructured text into meaningful analysis, insights, patterns and themes. MALENA leverages long standing corpora of IFC ESG data and institutional knowledge to identify and infer ESG risks. By applying an in-house adapted Sentiment Analysis methodology, MALENA provides easy-to-access project and portfolio insights. MALENA complements analysis by ESG Specialists and supports better-informed decision making. The MALENA AI was developed using supervised machine learning, an effective but time and data intensive approach that demands a lot of interaction between the “supervisors” (data analysts and data scientists) and the algorithm. Supervised machine learning requires the creation of large sets of labeled data to train the model to classify data and replicate outcomes on new datasets. The MALENA Data Readiness team is responsible for the curated collection of ESG data, the creation of an ESG taxonomy and the labeling of over 100k labels. These labeled datasets prepared by the Data Readiness team of ESG analysts support data scientists who train and finetune models. IFC’s ESG taxonomy has been created by using the Poolparty application, an approach we found to be very useful and resourceful. The iterative approaches to improving model performance have enabled the Data Readiness team to develop rules and quality control criteria to ensure high-quality training data. This approach to human-machine interaction, informed by a set of labeling rules, with the end goal of creating at-scale analytical capacity, has proven to be a highly successful approach to maximize MALENA’s performance. This presentation introduces how IFC trained MALENA’s brain.

Karsten Schrempp, Founder and Managing Partner at PANTOPIX

Knowledge Graphs help to bring together information from different information silos. They connect information smartly and turn it into explicit knowledge. The key to provide the relevant information for each user is to use an intelligent access management, which should be based on the available classification criteria. Users are described by the same categories as the available content itself.

This presentation shows you how to use semantic technologies to define profiles and control access to internal or external information silos with intelligent certificates derived from the knowledge

model.

Benoit Gaussin, Partner Manager at Enterprise Knowledge
Joseph Hilger, COO and Co-Founder at Enterprise Knowledge

The Great Resignation was a wake-up call to companies around the world about the importance of information capture and sharing. Critical knowledge workers left companies around the world, taking their tacit knowledge with them and forcing their employers to scramble to figure out how to replace them. In this presentation, Joe and Benoit will talk about how Semantics information management strategies and tools like PoolParty and Knowledge Graphs are automating the way that information is captured, organized, and made accessible across the organization. They will share the concepts of how these tools work along with successful examples from work the Enterprise Knowledge team has done in the past.

Valerio Cocchi, Senior Knowledge Engineer at Oxford Semantic Technologies
Albin Ahmeti, Researcher at Semantic Web Company

We present the integration of PoolParty and RDFox using an augmented intelligence approach and how they can effectively be used to manage data and do reasoning, using ‘negation as failure.’ This allows for a typical knowledge engineer (human-in-the-loop) to be able to change the data for the rules and get the desired outcome without requiring any other specialised knowledge. A knowledge engineer simply adds in PoolParty what a recipe should contain, and what a tag must not contain, and the rest is taken care of by RDFox where rules and reasoning infer the relationship between the two. This whole process enhances decision making as an augmented intelligence solution, in the sense that a user can observe directly the changes made in the interface, as well as being explainable by providing functionality in the backend. Here the user can exploit RDFox commands such as explain in order to be able to see the reason why a certain triple has been inferred — a courtesy of symbolic-based approach to AI. By using this approach, one can track the inferences back to the explicit triples that are responsible for the derived facts, further enhancing decision making for knowledge engineers in order to accommodate the needed changes in PoolParty.

Lizzy Jongma, Senior Project Lead at Network for War Collections WII.
Elsa Sklavounou, Vice President AI Alliances, Global Partnerships at RWS.
Lulit Tesfaye, Partner and Division Director at Enterprise Knowledge.
Dana Bublitz, Senior Information Architect at Microsoft.
Gloria Fernández Polín, Marketing Director EMEA & Asia at Squirro.

Hosted by Semantic Web Company’s Partner Success Marketing Manager and series creator Victoria Penker, our Women in Tech Panel features stories about successes and challenges in the tech sector, how the industry has changed for women, and what advice our panelists have on finding mentorship and community with other women in the industry. This panel featuring five trailblazing women in tech whose stories come from different fields within the high-tech sector. From building networks to tackling big goals to reflecting on how our greatest role models can be those closest to us, this is a panel you don’t want to miss!

DAY 2

The second day of the Summit kicked off with the official debut of our new and improved PoolParty for SharePoint.

The sessions that followed focused on the technical capabilities of PoolParty, our partner technologies, and the inspiring use cases of our customers.

At the end, the PoolParty Summit culminated in a presentation from COO Helmut Nagy and CTO Tomas Knap about the PoolParty roadmap and future outlook.

Click on the individual videos below to check out these sessions!

Helmut Nagy, COO and Strategic Product Manager at Semantic Web Company.
Alexi Lopez-Lorca, Data & Knowledge Engineer and Associate Director of Professional Services at Semantic Web Company.

This session unveils a product we have been working on for the past year: PoolParty for SharePoint! See how users can benefit from automated tagging and semantic search with our ready-made integration.

Ben Clinch, Principal Enterprise Architect at British Telecom.
Shaun Rolls, Senior Advisor and Lead Knowledge Graph Trainer at EDM Council.

British Telecom (BT) is creating a graph movement; bringing together those who already make use of the technology, with those who want to and those are keen to learn. They are sourcing the best training, platforms and advice from across the data industry. In a matter of months, the BT Graph Guild has grown to in excess of 140 members. Learn how BT did this and join them on their journey to better data through semantics technologies.

Jörg Schmidt, Senior Solution Architect at RWS.
André Schlotz, Vice President Global Automotive and Manufacturing Solutions at RWS.

Data-driven Content Management is a cutting-edge approach to managing and delivering content that leverages data insights to streamline the content supply chain and to personalize and optimize content for maximum impact.

This presentation explores use cases stretching from authoring, review, and translation to delivery, using an integrated solution that combines a Component Content Management System (CCMS), a Semantic AI suite, and a dynamic headless Content Delivery. With a specific focus on the authoring process, this presentation demonstrates how smart tagging and guided information project management can assist information architects and authors in effectively creating data-rich content compositions with maximal reuse.

The integration of a CCMS, Semantic AI suite, and dynamic headless Content Delivery offers a powerful solution for managing, automating, and delivering content that is relevant, engaging, and personalized for each audience. Learn more about the latest advancements in data-driven Content Management.

Klaus Fleischmann, CEO at Kaleidoscope.

Taxonomies and terminologies can be seen as different sides of the same coin. However, the focus is quite different. Taxonomies make linguistic data available for machines and humans to distill knowledge and often to manage chaos. Terminologies harmonize language, make sure everyone uses consistent and correct words, and try to avoid chaos from the outset. Organizations obviously require both, so it is only natural for SWC and Kaleidoscope to integrate their two platforms and offer a combined taxonomy and terminology management solution.

This presentation and demo show you how to connect your PoolParty taxonomy to the Kalcium terminology suite and add terminology benefits to your existing data: Human-grade, rich metadata, organizational decision workflows, and automatic guidance in word choice for authors and translators alike.

Victor Mireles, Technology Researcher at Semantic Web Company.

CKAN is the best known open-source data management system, powering hundreds of government data portals around the world. This talk presents an extension for CKAN that allows you to use any vocabulary that you manage with PoolParty, for the purposes of metadata creation and display. You can see how to connect your vocabulary management workflow with your data management and publishing platform, to increase semantic interoperability and findability. This talk also touches upon a federated data space architecture that makes use of these components to enable trusted data sharing between organizations.

Jan-Kees Schakel, Founder and Director at Sensing Clues Foundation

Talk of Jan-Kees Schakel (Sensing Clues) on how PoolParty is being used to create applications for nature conservation and wildlife protection.

Heather Hedden, Data and Knowledge Engineer at Semantic Web Company.
Donna Popky, Senior Taxonomy and Information Architecture Specialist at Harvard Business School.

Managing multiple taxonomies within an organization can be a challenge, but linking them together is a solution offering various benefits over separate taxonomies or a single taxonomy. This session begins with an introduction to the principles and methods of taxonomy linking, including the SKOS matching property, with a demonstration of project linking in PoolParty. The session then goes on to describe a specific use case of taxonomy linking by PoolParty customer Harvard Business School.

The Harvard Business School, like many organizations, is struggling with siloed data. Each business unit has implemented their own taxonomies to surface content in unique ways. In an effort to bridge these silos the Information Management Team at HBS has developed a Hub and Spoke model to link these taxonomies together. We created a hub that reflects all the different concepts in the spoke taxonomies and use project linking in PoolParty, incorporating SKOS match properties, to link spoke concepts to the hub.

Vassil Momtchev, CTO at Ontotext.

PoolParty Semantic Suite is the leading semantic middleware platform. The Semantic Web Company’s team trust the GraphDB product to store all internal application state and use it as an external RDF database. This talk covers the possible integration options from the perspective of the GraphDB database. Furthermore, the database offers many critical features like high availability, data virtualization, powerful search, text mining, etc., that can improve the developer experience of the PoolParty users. This presentation also shares the high-level vision and the GraphDB product roadmap.

Bonnie Griffin, Taxonomist at PayPal.

We know that the application of taxonomy principles is key for establishing a source of truth, embedding concepts in context, using standards to bring structure to data, and classifying content consistently, but the journey from the “What is taxonomy?” conversation all the way to approving taxonomy tags for content can be unpredictable. How do you navigate advocating for taxonomy implementation amid competing priorities? How do you ensure your work complements existing structures? This talk takes a detailed look at the development and deployment of a content taxonomy of help article concepts. See how PoolParty’s various tools enabled a straightforward taxonomy project to not only support improved findability and reporting through leveraging PoolParty’s PowerTagging feature, but also facilitated broader improvements through features like project linking.

Michael Iantosca, Senior Director of Content Platforms at Avalara Inc.

Even the world’s largest and marquee name brands have struggled and have yet to eliminate content silos and deliver an integrated content experience for internal and external users. Avalara has accomplished this elusive feat in under 18 months based on the use of advanced semantic intelligence and architecture. In this talk, Michael Iantosca from Avalara steps through the user and business challenges, shares his team’s vision and strategy, shows what and how his team implemented it, and shares Michael’s vision and progress towards what he calls Cognitive Content and a graph-driven future.

Tomas Knap,
CTO at Semantic Web Company

Helmut Nagy,
COO and Strategic Product Manager at Semantic Web Company

The final presentation of the PoolParty Summit 2023 looks ahead to our vision for PoolParty for the next years to come and provide an overview of upcoming developments in PoolParty Semantic Suite, PoolParty Integration Layer, and PoolParty for SharePoint.

Check out the previous PoolParty Summit 2021