Two new services based on semantic technologies came up recently: Jinni a recommendation portal for movies and tv shows and BooRah’s Restaurant Reputation Report. Both are good examples how the semantic web may be monetized.
Jinni provides recommendations, answering a free given search. Based on semantic technologies Jinni uses Natural Language Processing on plot, mood, style, setting, soundtrack and more in combination with an ontology, created by film professionals (like Jinni says). When it launched in December, Jinni had 10,000 movie, TV and video titles.
In Jinni you don’t need to know about exact title, actor, director, place or year of production to get an result, you can enter simply a phrase describing the mood, genre or place the movie is about, and you will guided through a facilitated search to narrow your search and get at the end what you want. Or alternative, if you search for a movie and you have only a vague idea of the plot, you can formulate a plot’s description in free phrasing. As it also offers APIs for Internet and TV content providers you can make your way direct to an online store to download or purchase the movie.
Another idea how to develop business orientated semantic web services comes with BooRah. BooRah is a service targeting restaurant owners to provide them reports of positive and negative reviews of food, service and ambiance at their restaurants. For that the service monitors negative and positive trends across hundreds of online review sites. Now restaurant owners can subscribe to receive a PDF of their monthly reports for an introductory price of $15 and a regular price of $25 per month. This PDFs came with charts, trends, rankings, summaries and some quotes from users, month by month. The reports may enable those restaurant owners to react and improve their services in the specific field. A simple but straight forward way to make money with semantic technologies
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Thanks for these thoughts about monetizing semantic technologies. At Jinni, we do see our semantic approach as offering a practical, uniquely effective solution to the quandary of not knowing what to watch. Feedback always welcome!
I don’t see the evidence that either of these two companies are using semantic technology. In the case of Jinni, it looks like they’ve assembled a big relational database that users can search and drill down through; for Boorah, it looks like they use keywords like “love” and “hate” to determine whether reviews are positive or negative. In neither case do I see any evidence of usage of things like RDF or APIs. Or is natural-language processing by itself considered a “semantic technology”? That would actually answer a question I’ve had for a while.
Yaron: Good point. Jinni does not use any of the Semantic Web technologies (rdf, owl, sparql). I personally consider that we will start seeing Semantic applications. If they are Semantic Web applications (because they use rdf, etc) is another question. The semantic applications in general make things smarter. So adding machine learning techniques etc in these applications make them now semantic applications, even if they dont use rdf, etc.
So you consider “semantic application” and “semantic web application” to mean two different things? That’s a valid position to have, although it’s probably not shared by the author of this post, judging from the title.
Poor old Monet…
I think it wouldn´t make sense if the “Semantic Web” would be considered as the one which purely relies on RDF. OpenCalais without dereferendable URIs (which was the fact until Release 4) was also celebrated as a “Semantic Web” Star, although the RDF it produced didn´t have any extra value to any other representation form.
Companies which start to do business on top of the “real” Semantic Web which nowadays is also called “Web of Data” (using Linking Open Data) do that only because they want to gain typical first mover effects. There are no mature business models on top of Linked Data yet.
That´s different with Semantic technologies in general. And we shouldn´t forget, what the “Semantic Web aka LD Cloud” is built upon now: On Wikipedia and other data sources which are definitely NOT “THE” semantic web.
At the end of the day it´s all about pragmatism. And as Chris Welty said: The only new about the Semantic Web is the Web (and it´s network effects).
Well, I wasn’t talking about purely RDF: data APIs are also a standard part of the semantic web, and there’s quit a lot of those out already. And it’s true that no one yet is making much money from the data out there, but does that mean that any company that does something relating to meaning should be grouped under “Semantic Web”, given that they’re the closest thing? That seems like the equivalent of telling a five-year-old what a great artist he is, to encourage him to draw more.
Personally I wouldn’t apply the label Semantic Web to either of these services, as for me the term is tied very closely to the Semantic Web technology stack. This stack has some fairly important features, such as the ability to use the Web to link data across distributed locations; applications that don’t exploit these features may simply be “semantic” applications (whatever that means) delivered across the Web, rather than Semantic Web applications per se.
However, what these services do demonstrate is how semantic technologies in general, or any new ways of doing things, may generate revenue through traditional channels or business models. While I hope the Web of Data does produce many novel business models, the traditional approaches won’t necessarily go away, and nor should they.
There are some more thoughts about how Linked Data can drive traffic and revenue to traditional channels in this post:
http://tomheath.com/blog/2008/09/where-is-the-business-value-in-linked-data/
Hope it’s useful.
Tom.
I absolutely agree with you, Tom!
- Semantic Web relies on the W3C technology stack which generates a lot of advantages due to higher interoperability between datasets and/or applications
- Semantic Technologies can be built on other specifications and can be implemented in many different ways
Only from a customer´s perspective it doesn´t make a lot of difference at the moment, since the Semantic Web still cannot benefit from (extremely) high network effects or dozens of new business models, since people are not used to semantic (web) applications in general.
Just take a look at http://blog.semantic-web.at/2009/02/04/pimp-your-google/ – I promise: For 75% of the web-users tagclouds are still an unusual thing. LOD folks are somehow the “elite” in their way of re-thinking the web. But we shouldn´t forget “of telling a five-year-old what a great artist he is, to encourage him to draw more” (Thanks to Yaron for this picture!)