Company description
OntoForce started in May 2011 providing consultancy, networking, training & support to deliver fast efficient safe information integration and evangelize semantic web capabilities to deliver good search/find platforms to big end user groups.
Our mantra is "Discover Your Data". We don't have a logo/homepage yet. Our delivery to the customers is key! And word of mouth helps with our pub ...
We have 2 concrete projects with minor seed money and we do a lot of bootstrapping working late in the evenings and a lot in the weekends, already for a year now. And we thank our wifes/family keeping up with our crazy lifestyle ...
(1) MaterialSource: a facebook-like semantic material database with SPARQL Web Pages (SWP) application to help material users make conscious environmentally aware decisions about the materials we consume and for providers to make accessible information about their materials. Application users are providers (pay small fees), scientists (free) and consumers (free). Our semantic stack is set up with AWS (Amazon Web Servers), TopBraid Suite components, SPARQL Web Pages with soon an AllegroGraph database.
For more information about the project, see www.materialsource.com and check out an article dd 21 April http://see.sc/BI8rFF
Limited access beta version is currently up and running.
(2) schoolKID: When we heard that my eldest kid, Renzo, had dyspraxia at the age of 5 and associated burdens at school, I digged into data and found that information integration is still far behind in most schools here in Flanders, not even getting into the topic of sharing data across schools and school-nets. As children move between schools, there is no continuity in their records.
Renzo's very motivated teacher, Tom Vankemmel, helped me understand the pain points and needs. Together with his best friend, Stephane Roelandt, a CRM expert, we started a non-profit company to roll out schoolKID with the initial goals of helping principals and their administration to address bottlenecks associated with finding scattered information about school students and delivering powerful but simple and attractive dashboards. To have upper level decision, leaders and governance aligned, we’ve established connections with the Flemish department of education and heads of 4 biggest school-nets.
We currently have a live web application and are working on obtaining sufficient critical mass to roll out "my schoolKID" so that any parent/student can login to find his/her track in schools grades, feedback, contests, skill assessments, logistic track back, and even sensitive data. A substantial amount of our current investment goes towards legal advise and support in getting all privacy set up right for kids under 18.
There are more projects in our pipeline, all will have same architecture but the 2 above projects are our focus now.
Technically we use following components:
- TopQuadrant's TBCME (TopBraid Composer Maestro Edition) and TBL (TopBraid Live) SPARQL Motion, TopBraid Ensemble components and their top experts to advise/help us with setting it up.
- We apply SWP (Semantic Web Pages) for our faceted and graph based browsing.
- We will enable the app on smartphones and tablets via HTML5.
- We apply ontologies such as SKOS, SPIN, FOAF, GR, SIOC, ...
- We use RDFa to get us started with medium OWL
- We will probably use AllegroGraph soon
- We use D2R to connect to our relational data
- We quickly deploy business intelligence (BI) and business analytics (BA) web apps via SalesForce.com (SFDC) web apps. The SFDC foundation is already donating licenses for schools starting in Flanders
- We strongly believe in the power of social media, thus the use SFDC Chatter is applied in all projects to be able to collaborate efficiently with 80% less emails. We like to call it our 'professional facebook and much more'.
We strongly believe in partnership with SalesForce.com and TopQuadrant as two key partners but also with top experts around the globe. We are training active content managers in our projects so they can also use our stack with minimal help from our end.
And last but not least, our wonderful team and networked experts in Belgium, Czech Republic, Australia, USA, UK, Netherlands, ... the MaterialSource team and Juul Vanleysen as visionair ans believer ... and of course, again but very important, our family and wifes that keep up with us living in the (extremely) fast lane!
Thx for your reading, your interest and hoping on your support, vote, advise, help, ...
Cheers from the Ontoforce team!
Team
Our team consists of national and international employees/freelancers/students with complementairy expertises.
Core team:
- Tom Vankemmel: expertised sales person, fund raiser and passionate half-time teacher
LinkedIn & Twitter Tom
- Stephane Roelandt: senior consultant CRM with project management skills, software business analyst, software developer but now SalesForce.com evangelizer.
LinkedIn & Twitter Stef
- Hans Constandt: senior business integrator, employee at farma multinational working on Innovative Medicine Initiative (IMI) knowledge managment project 'OpenPHACTS', global project manager, knowledge management and semantic web expert.
LinkedIn & Twitter Hans
Associated members, adviosers, supporters :
- Phil Brooks: semantic expert who helps us only in his very little but extremely valuable free time as he's rock and rolling with his team and semantic capabilities in the same farma multinational as Hans is working in.
- TopQuadrant experts such as Gokhan Soydan, Holger Knublauch and support from Irene Polikoff, Dean Allemang and more .. thx
- Advise and help from SalesForce.com people in Dublin and Vivens ... warm and strong support from the SalesForce.com Foundation and Sarah Brophy and her team.
- Jaroslav Martasek: our Czech expert developer helping us in his free time as he believes in our projects.
- The MaterialSource.com team advising, steering, challenging us from end user perspective ... Juul Vanleysen as inspirer, visionair and believer. Ruud Lathouwers as semantic content manager helping handle data sensitive bottlenecks.
- Flemish government organizations are helping us with free advise AO (Agentschap Ondernemen), FlandersDC (Flanders District of Creativity) , VOKA (Flemish Entrepreneurial Network), BRYO (Bright Young Entrepreneurs), Vlerick Management School support also coming with Enterprise.be contest ...
As a result of that we are accepted on a Royal Mission to Washington, New York and Boston end of June to help connect, network and evangelize our mission.
- And again our families and strong wifes supporting us working a lot in our free time but believe in our projects .
- And many more that joined us on our exciting trip!
Business model
Consultancy with low entry and strategic partnership in projects with shared resources, efforts and risks.
Our business model is based on a strong belief that only win-win-win works with shared risks and professional partnerships. We are business to business to consumer (B2B2C) company providing fast efficient information integration, using semantic standards to make not software but data reusable.
We also add a layer of social media on top if it to connect to the customer directly with appropriate security and control mechanismes. This will augment efficiency with 10-25% as email masses and communication errors are reduced significantly.
We use open source filosophy and life long lease of licenses if more support from the beginning.
Our model is
1. First low threshhold entry to do a 1-3 day investigation on potential optimisation of information handling.
2. Proposals with short, agile work packages, pay per delivery and part of the profit margin when successful using scrum agile project managment techniques.
3. We do individual and group trainings in our training rooms, on site and via the web.
4. Support and lease is done with our (bigger) partners where we also get a percentage of the deal.
Competitive advantage
- The team, our network, our drive, our speed, our professionalism, our passion, our innovation and our motivation.
- Our focus on the customers staying close to them and using very agile and iterative engaged techniques to do a lot in less time!
- Our innovative setup with amazon secured https servers set up, semantic TBL instances and semantic web pages that perform well in the current architecture.
Investors
Tom Vankemmel
