XML, Semantic Web & Data Intelligence: More Conference Info
I have been asked to present my work: “The Future of ACORD: Using Data Standards In The Semantic Web” at the Insurance Industry’s major conference ACORD-LOMA Insurance Systems Forum from May 20th - 22nd at the Dolphin Resort at Disney World. Since Microsoft and IBM are platnum sponsers, I’m expecting lots of free stuff 
At least, more than you get speaking at the Rational Conference.
I have included the detailed snippet from the brochure below, and more information about when I’m scheduled should appear on the website after February 2nd when I deliver all my media information (my head shots from junior high apparently don’t cut it anymore)
My primary thesis is how to use the language in which we communicate, XML (here ACORD standard) and apply meta-data to enable us to gain insight and increase both human and machine understanding of the data we have, essentially helping us make better decisions. It’s easy to see how a system knowing what a policy or a named-insured is beyond just an XML tag can benefit decision making systems including competative rating and data mining for risk patterns in insurance. All of this is based off of using RDF and Ontologies (here developed for insurance) to make relationships between data. Imagine how much more valuable a data warehousing operation would be with this solution.
I think you’ll like it and I hope you can make it.
My question to you is: Do you think the industry is ready, having just now got up to speed with webservices and Service Oriented Architecture, to apply meta-data to our language? Although the benefits of making the semantic leap are real, is it realisitic in the near future?
My Presentation Brochure Detail Snippet
XML, as a describer and standardization of data and datatypes, are changing as we move in to a future where humans won’t be consuming data as much as other computers will. The Semantic web is about metadata, or “data about data” that tells computers what type of data it is, and it’s context. It is about a language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. This allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.
For the insurance industry, this transformation can bring incredible advances and solutions to the problems we are experiencing as an industry that XML and webservices alone can’t solve, including managing large amounts of data and customer information. In the Semantic Web, for instance, we can know what products may interest a customer through relationships built from their CLUE reports and their preferences or send self-describing products to agents without any upfront setup. Most importantly, it can be used in data warehousing applications to allow insurance companies to create their own meaning from their customer data for better rating by deploying reasoning systems to determine what risks are related to what datasets deeper than ever before.
ACORD standards will play the lead in this, and companies that are adopting ACORD standards in managing their business communications now, especially using ACORD in their webservices, will have a lead in this advancement. ACORD can become “richer” when paired with RDF documents that not only enforce the standards, but describe them as well.
In my presentation, I will demonstrate the future value of deploying these reasoning systems, demonstrate the work I’ve done in developing reasoning systems for ACORD formatted data, demonstrate a sample using Firefox and MIT’s Piggy Bank plug-in (http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/ ) of a future ACORD standard based website that will show a customer, the products they may like and the best rate; all from self-describing meta-data and without any code (only the data itself)
I work with MIT’s Semantic Web SIMILE (http://simile.mit.edu/) project as well as invented and run the opensource cl-semantic project (http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-semantic/ ) that uses Lisp to discover relationships between data for automatic processing and the realization of patterns, geared specifically towards insurance and other probability based businesses. I have also been involved in research creating a RDF version of the ACORD standards (the subset of Surety) to allow ACORD standards to be used in a Semantic Web demonstration. I am also an ACORD voting member of the Casualty/Surety working group and sub-groups underneath. I am well known in the industry for my work, and you can browse my referred and non-referred research papers from my website (http://www.brandonwerner.com).
