Introductions: Wafik Farag, SkyPrise, Inc. - DiBase

Hi, my name is Wafik Farag, Ph.D.   I have been working on information management for over two decades.  In particular, the last decade+ has concentrated on dynamic information integration.  This resulted from working with top national and international businesses that suffer due to lack of agility from information systems.  I have delivered projects worth tens of millions dollar and seen how change orders and time to respond was critical for businesses to perform.  Pharma and healthcare suffer from the same dilemma.   For example, scientific discovery is a continuous unplanned process and requires various decisions along the path -- it is a dynamic process.  A pre-design system can not satisfy such needs.  This triggered me to create DiBase a dynamic integration and collaboration platform.  

 

I am interested in semantic activity - the vision the promises and to observe new approaches to the problem.  Also, how will the semantic level evolve to include other information levels such as data, functions, and results?   Semantic integration of ontologies seems challenging now, but this is just one level in the puzzle.  How will this extend to solving the data integration problem or web services integration, etc.  How will the roadmap from semantics to real world systems drive itself out?  

 

Currently DiBase does dynamic integration at all levels - semantic, data, function/applications (i.e. SOA/ web-services) and results.  DiBase integrates ontologies, desperate unstructured datasets, functional workflows and results.   We use a contextual model to ensure correctness and integrity of information during the integration process in the system.  However, DiBase does not support constructs such as RDF which are gaining a lot of interest.   Hence, I am interested on how will constructs such as RDF be extended.  Also, how will existing ontologies be integrated?

 

This is a great innovative group and I am looking forward to it.   

 

Kind Regards

-Wafik Farag