Jans Aasman is a provider, for two aspects. He is CEO of one of the backbone graph databases in the sector and he's also a researcher publishing articles and papers in the field. He covers both worlds - the academic and the applied. Danilo de Oliveira Pereira got him on the table for a few questions.
Danilo: Is it possible to find ‘causal’ relationships in real-world Knowledge Graphs?
Jans: Yes. For example, if you look at hospital data, you will have events like diagnostics, tests, vital signs, procedures, medications, and outcomes. You could use that data to find simple correlations between events, but given the fact that correlations don't necessarily imply causation, you have to do more advanced analytics to create predictions that take into account the temporal unfolding of events. Once you take the 'arrow of time' into account, you can cautiously start talking about causation. Once you have found interesting (statistical and causal) relations in your knowledge graph, you want to represent those causal relations in the knowledge graph so that we can use it for patient care and further analysis.
Danilo: What does the future of semantic graph databases look like?
Jans: Semantic graph databases will become the glue that keeps all the information in the enterprise together. The vendors of semantic graph databases will design new techniques to make it easier to transform enterprise data into semantic data and make it way easier to query and analyze the data.
Danilo: What can people expect from your keynote at Semantics?
Jans: An interesting talk about how to represent events in a Semantic Knowledge Graph, how to query those events to do advanced analytics, and then how to represent the things you learned in your analytics as new knowledge in your Knowledge Graph. We'll touch on several enterprise domains to show that the approach is generic.
Dr. Jans Aasman started his career as an experimental and cognitive psychologist, earning his PhD in cognitive science with a detailed model of car driver behavior using pioneering AI techniques. He has spent most of his professional life in telecommunications research, specializing in intelligent user interfaces and applied artificial intelligence projects. Dr. Aasman has also served as a part-time professor in the Industrial Design department of the Technical University of Delft. Jans is currently the CEO of Franz Inc., the leading supplier of Graph database products that provide the storage layer for powerful reasoning and ontology modeling capabilities for Knowledge Graph applications.
Dr. Aasman has gained notoriety as a conference speaker at such events as KMWorld, Smart Data, NoSQL Now, Semantic Technologies Conference, International Semantic Web Conference, Java One, Linked Data Planet, INSA, GeoWeb, SEMANTiCs, AAAI, IEEE, Enterprise Data World, STIDS, ODSC, Text Analytics, and DEBS to name a few.
