Restarting my blog and research

Thanks to everyone who has stuck with me over the past few years as I got consumed in projects and neglected my blog. That phase of my life was officially over in mid-December (2013). I just joined a small consulting firm, Nine Points Solutions. I now have the opportunity to both consult and to continue my research into extracting and managing policies in support of security, configuration and operations. I am very excited to have the opportunity to do this, and will share what I am doing and what I learn (when I can).

As part of restarting the blog, I did go through and clean up my overviews and list of blogs that I read. Please take a look and tell me about any blogs that I missed and that you find valuable. I didn't change the overall design of the site, because it works for me. But, let me know if that is not true for you, my readers.

Lastly, I want to bring everyone up-to-speed (at a very high level) on my work over the last two+ years ... I had the opportunity to architect and create a policy-based management system based on OWL ontologies and using semantic technologies. The system was written in Java and used the Stardog triple store from Clark and Parsia. Needless to say, I made mistakes, got a lot of help from the Stardog developers, and learned a lot. I will be sharing some of that learning in future posts.

Thanks again! I am looking forward to writing more in the coming weeks!

Andrea

Welcome ...

For those who know me, you know that I used to have a blog at msdn (http://blogs.msdn.com/policy_based_business), and I used to work for Microsoft. Well, that all changed in early 2009 when my incubation was de-funded, and then in March when I headed out on my own.

I am now consulting and working on software for capturing, analyzing and using the "implicit" ontologies and domain knowledge that exists in business people's heads. The work is based on several technologies addressing:

• ontology development and alignment
  
• controlled natural language processing
• semantic web
  
• knowledge engineering
  
• business process development and modeling
• and more!

... all accessed through normal business tooling like Word and Excel!

What I will try to do in my posts is to explain the technology and how it can be useful. My goal is to communicate with both business and IT people - providing summaries, additional thoughts, and technical details. I also will provide pointers to the basic information and research, as well as a pointers to my own work. There is a lot out there, if you have the time to investigate it!

So, please stay tuned. And, I hope that this blog will be of great value to you.