Industry Ontologies: Case Studies in Creating and Extending Schema.org for Industry-specific Vocabularies

The presentation introduces listeners into the details of the most important global semantic vocabulary build jointly by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Yandex: schema.org. It then discusses the experiences related to the creation of “hosted” extensions for the automotive industries (existing: auto.schema.org) and for the financial industries (in making: fibo.schema.org). The two extensions, built by an international team of specialists managed by MakoLab with full respect to the community processes, have two different creation strategies which will be presented and discussed.

The use cases for both vocabularies will be demonstrated. They are related to both “external” business effects (better visibility of the websites using them on the web) and “internal” effects (new kind of analytics and search capacities).

The presentation will also invite to participate to two W3C Community Groups responsible for the open communication activities around the two extensions.

Dr Mirek Sopek graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Technical University of Lodz. In 1992 he obtained the PhD in Theoretical Chemistry. In 1989 he created MakoLab – a business operating in the field of digital publishing, transformed later into a web-oriented company. Between 1996 and 2000 he worked in Canadian and US branches of HyperCube, Inc. In 2007 he led MakoLab through its IPO on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. He was also active in the scientific domains. He worked as an adjunct professor at two universities in Poland. Since 2009 Mirek Sopek has been leading Semantic Web-oriented R&D division of MakoLab. In mid-2013, he became the President of Chemical Semantics, Inc. (Gainesville Florida). Mirek is active in the area of semantic technologies for automotive and financial industries. In this capacity he contributed to the automotive extension for schema.org and is now working on its financial extension.