Rakuten Technology Conference 2016

Semantic technologies are increasingly gaining importance to cope with the wealth of data that humans are confronted with in diverse application domains.One key challenge where they are particularly promising is the one where end users are put in charge of directly accessing complex data.  In such settings, semantic information is used to support the users by providing them a view of the data that they can easily understand and explore.  In this presentation we illustrate some significant challenges that arise in this context.  On the one hand we exhibit technologies that allow engineers to semantically enrich high-level user requests, and seamlessly access terabytes of relational data.We discuss a significant use-case of this in the oil and gas engineering domain.  On the other hand, we show how to automatically enrich complex taxonomies to improve easiness of navigation and profitability.  We present the approach to this used in Rakuten Ichiba.

Slide Deck
https://www.slideshare.net/secret/rMPp957Tircp1P