UBBC Limited was founded by Graham Deane in 2008 to explore the business applications of formal knowledge representation.
Commercial activities were suspended at the end of 2010 to conduct academic research on the nature of inconsistency and techniques for handling inconsistencies within structured knowledge.
Since 2016, on completion of his PhD* at the Department of Computing, Imperial College in London, the business went on build the Smart Ontology Tools to provide our clients with a low risk way of adopting semantic technologies.
The mantra understanding builds better commerce reflects how building a comprehensive model of the knowledge available within an organisation, and understanding the (in)accuracy of such a model, can be used to improve decision making, inform planning and increase operational efficiency.
The research on techniques to handle inconsistencies confirmed how adopting more expressive logics for knowledge representation provides a powerful tool for enriching the information derivable from the model and exposing any inconsistencies within it.
However, in spite of offering may benefits, the use of such techniques outside of the academic environment remains sparse and the use of ontologies exploiting reasoning is less widespread than the adoption of the basic graph standards.
We believe the biggest barriers to adoption are driven by the perceived complexity of getting started. These include:
The Smart Ontology Tools have been designed to allow organisations to get tangible benefits quickly. By focussing on simplifying discovery and integration, organisations hit the ground running and immediately allow users to:
* The full PhD Thesis is published in
Deane G., (2016) Preferential Description Logics: Reasoning in the presence of inconsistencies. In
Computing PhD theses, Sep-2016, Imperial College London.