Presentations from the Second TopBraid User Group Meeting - SemTech2009

The Second TopBraid Suite Open User Group Meeting was conducted at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009 in San Jose, CA, Thursday, June 18, 2009, 09:45 AM - 12:45 PM. The Agenda for the meeting and links to the presentations used by the speakers is given below.

User Group Meeting Agenda and Presentations
•9:45am - 9:55am
Welcome (Robert Coyne, TopQuadrant)

•9:55am - 10:30am
Keynote User Talk 1:
"Using SPARQLMotion to Execute Task Networks among Distributed Cyber Physical Systems",
Cyber-physical systems define networks of interactive sensors and actuators, grounded in the physical world. Such systems require a high degree of interoperation to achieve the system's objective. SPARQLMotion, a model-driven scripting language, has been used to achieve that level of interoperation. In addition, this approach results in greater operational redundancy among networks through distributed control. Three recent extensions to SPARQLMotion will be shared along with a motivating example for their use.
John T. Carson, Software Engineer, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics
(slides)

•10:30am - 11:00am
TopBraid - New Capabilities - Sampler 1
Presentation/demo of key aspects of TopQuadrant's Enterprise Vocabulary Management (EVM) Solution Package (just announced. Customers across a range of industries are building EVM solutions on top of the TopBraid Suite platform. In response to customer requirements, TopQuadrant is offering an EVM Solution Package of commonly needed, high-value components including models, scripts (e.g. for workflow management with approvals), and application configuration templates.
Irene Polikoff, CEO and Co-founder, TopQuadrant, Inc.
(slides)

•11:00am - 11:35am
Keynote User Talk 2:
"Managing Your Online Social Graph with TopBraid Composer"
In this short user experience session Marco will show you how he makes use of TopBraid Composer to keep track of the Semantic Web Meetup community (http://www.swnyc.org) and how he manages events, rsvps and security. In addition we will take a look at some of the editing and reporting features readily available and build into TopBraid Composer to visualize community data for evaluation and the identification of trends.
Marco Neumann, Information Scientist and CEO & Founder, KONA
(slides)

•11:35am - 12:05pm
TopBraid - New Capabilities - Sampler 2
For QA of ontologies, many users have interest in knowing key statistics or metrics regarding their models, such as the number of properties that reference each class. A simple, flexible, convenient to use solution will be demonstrated within TopBraid. By importing a special ontology, and running provided scripts, desired metrics fields get populated, and a reporting script is used to pretty-print the results to html.
Ralph Hodgson, CTO and Co-founder, TopQuadrant, Inc.
(slides)

•12:05pm - 12:40pm
User Feedback Session (conducted through lunch),
moderated by Tom Fitzgerald, Director of Sales, TopQuadrant
Notes from the session:
1. Education –tremendous demand for online training materials. Customers recommend we provide more training material (tutorials, videos, examples). Training is a key to success for many TopBraid customers.
2. Help Menu – context search and more examples –need a “Getting Started” tutorial. The tutorial would include how to use the Help Menu effectively.
3. User’s Forum – “great asset” – would like to see it expanded to include wiki format and possibly all of our products. Discsussion of how the forum can be expanded and provide more extensive support, e.g., examples of customer applications.
4. Site Spin – Tim Smith – new capability
5. Mind Mapping integration – Tim Smith talked about the value of providing a easy tool for business users to map out model requirements. The mapping could then be integrated into TBC.
6. Customer Use Cases – request to expand website to include tab for Use Cases and customer scroll

TopQuadrant appreciated and valued this input and is responding quickly, in particular by making the extensive Help provided in TopBraid Composer more accessible, and in providing more support assets through our web site. See links on the TopBraid Composer page, Support and other product pages, and this recent post. for further details and links. Additionally, two new slide sets are being provided for download the give an extensive tour of TopBraid Composer capabilities, and in depth details on importing data into RDF and transforming data with TopBraid utilities and power tools.

•12:40pm - 12:45pm
Announcements and Closing Remarks
Robert Coyne, TopQuadrant

(See also Reflections from the First TopBraid Suite User Group Meeting, May 21, 2008,San Jose, CA)