[11] Sheth proposed a realization of Vannevar Bush's MEMEX vision as the Relationship Web,[12] based on the semantic metadata extracted from text.
His METEOR project demonstrated the value of research with real-world applications; its tools were used in graduate courses in several countries, and its technology was licensed to create a commercial product and was followed up by METEOR-S.
Starting in 1987, Sheth gave a number of tutorials at ICDE, VLDB, SIGMOD, and other major conferences in the area of distributed (federated) data management and developed scientific foundations and architectural principles to address these issues of database interoperability.
[24] Together with Dimitrios Georgakopoulos and Marek Rusinkiewicz, he developed the ticketing method for concurrency control of global transactions that need to see and preserve a consistent state across multiple databases.
In 1993, he initiated InfoHarness, a system that extracted metadata from diverse content (news, software code, and requirements documents) using a Mozilla browser-based faceted search.
[33] This system transitioned into a product by Bellcore in 1995 and was followed by a metadata-based search engine for a personal, electronic program guide and Web-based videos for a cable set-top box.
[34] He licensed this technology he developed at the University of Georgia for his company Taalee in the same year that Tim-Berners Lee coined the term Semantic Web.
[36] The third component of the system utilized ontology and metadata (annotation) to support semantic search, browsing, profiling, personalization, and advertising.
Google's Infobox) which not only displayed metadata about the searched entity pulled from the ontology and metabase but also provided what was termed "blended semantic browsing and querying".
[40] He introduced the concept of semantic perception to reflect the process of converting massive amounts of IoT data into higher level abstractions to support human cognition and perception in decision making, which involves an IntellegO ontology-enabled abductive and deductive reasoning framework for iterative hypothesis refinement and validation.
[41] In early 2009 he initiated and framed the issue of social media analysis in a broad set of semantic dimensions he called "Spatio-Temporal-Thematic" (STT).
[46] Sheth founded Infocosm, Inc. in 1997, which licensed and commercialized the METEOR technology from the research he led at the University of Georgia, resulting in distributed workflow management products, WebWork[47] and ORBWork.
[54] In 2016, Cognovi Labs was founded based on the Twirtis technology[55] resulting from the research he led at the Kno.e.sis Center of the Wright State University.