The University of Oslo (UiO) is one of the many partners of the Optique project, with researchers contributing to several of the project’s work packages.
UiO also coordinates the Optique project. Professor Arild Waaler, leader of the research group for Logic and Intelligent Data (LogID) at the Department of Informatics, UiO, is project coordinator for the Optique project. Professor Martin Giese, also in the LogID group, is the project’s Assistant Scientific Director.
The LogID group currently consists of 25 researchers, most of whom are involved in the Optique project. LogID started as a group for research into formal logic and automated reasoning, but in recent years, the group’s focus has shifted. Since about 2007, LogID has increasingly oriented its research towards Semantic Technologies. LogID’s research efforts have been largely application driven, with focus on applications in the Norwegian oil and gas industry, and also in the public sector.
Oil and Gas Industry has complex IT challenges related to Big Data access. Large, multi-departmental corporations often rely on incompatible tools and data models for the various tasks faced by individual departments. In addition, data is often stored in ways that were designed for specialised uses that are not suited to current needs. Aside from internal data exchange, corporations often need to communicate information to partners, contractors and authorities.
In small corporations, working on small data sets, experts can manually retrieve data on demand. The expert understands the various data sources and the data needs of the end users, and can tailor queries to fit any request. For corporations working on large data sets, relying on experts for data access becomes expensive and time-consuming. It is estimated that between 30 % and 70 % of an IT engineer’s time is spent looking for and assessing the quality of the data found [Crompton, 2008].
In the LogID group, we believe that semantic technologies are the way to bridge the gap between different data formats and models. In recent years, we have focused much of our research on a technology known as Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA). It is the OBDA technology that is the basis for the Optique platform.
End-user access is a major part of the Optique project. LogID has several researchers with backgrounds in human-computer interaction, and the group works on semantics-driven query interfaces. LogID is one of the major contributors to the Optique platform’s Visual Query Interface (VQI).
In late 2014, the LogID group was awarded funding for SIRIUS, one of the Centers for Research-Driven Innovation supported by the Research Counsil of Norway.
Recently, LogID has recruited two new adjunct professors to the group, with the intention of broadening our scope to applications in health care and life sciences.
Engineers in industry spend a significant amount of their time searching for data that they require for their core taks. E.g., in the oil&gas industry, 30–70% of engineers time is spent looking for and assessing the quality of data. (Crompton, 2008)
Numbers provided by Optique partners Siemens and Statoil suggest that Optique could free up a substantial amount of expert time annually in these two companies alone. The potential benefit from a more effective analysis of the data will be even higher.
The project will provide a semantic end-to-end connection between users and data sources. The Optique platform will feature an intuitive, general, but adaptable end-user interface. Data can be integrated from multiple, also streaming, data sources, with the possibility for large-scale parallel cloud processing and storage.
The Optique project brings a unique combination of technologies to bear on Big Data challenges: An end-user-oriented query interface; scalable query rewriting from the end-user to the source vocabulary; temporal and real-time continuous stream processing; scalable storage and query evaluation using elastic clouds.