Semantic ETL for Real Time Big Data Analytics
What’s the link between the trends of more and more objects and even commercial transactions on the web being described in a machine-readable, semantic format and the endless streaming of all that data?
Market Maker Technology
Overview
The First Retail team has worked with many large and small companies in ecommerce. We’ve observed first hand the challenges imposed by aligning multiple product catalogs from multiple vendors.
An important lesson is that structured data, whether product catalogs, taxonomies, or ontologies, is never perfect. As ontologies grow in size and are created and modified by larger teams, inconsistencies are introduced. Additionally, important information is stored as text fields (such as documentation fields, descriptions, and displayable names) within these ontologies. Accordingly, First Retail’s Market Maker Technology is founded on the assumption that purely deductive methods will not be sufficient nor scalable for the purposes of aligning large numbers of large ontologies. Our approach uses a combination of heuristic and deductive methods in order to align ontologies.
Function
The Market Maker is a patent pending technology that uses heuristic approaches to align multiple ontologies with each other and to a standard ontology. The Market Maker is a highly scalable solution whose input is structured data in any format (ranging from formal ontology definitions to more loosely structured data) and whose output is an alignment of the data instances to a given taxonomy or ontology.
Data Input
The Market Maker handles multiple data inputs, both structured and semi-structured. We have associated technologies that can handle fully unstructured data as well (natural language texts, for example).
Outputs
Using the Market Maker, all information can be aligned to any given domain ontology and made available to end users through interfaces such as SPARQL or other structured formats.
Scalability
Our patent-pending approach to ontology alignment is designed to align many thousands of ontologies together while horizontally scaling on loosely coupled commodity hardware.
To better understand how this technology can be applied to a broad range of technical problems, particularly those that require very high scalability and real-time response, please contact us today.