Today in the morning, I wrote a short blog philosophizing about linked data and the value for enterprises. I asked a couple of questions and in its core I was wondering: “Which services and keyplayers will drive the web of data in the next few months?”
In the meantime I had the pleasure to listen to Talis´ Semantic Web Gang Podcast (January 2009 with Tom Tague from Calais) and some answers came into my mind:
- Some service providers will provide the highest accuracy regarding the links or tags (and the “things behind them) they provide for a given ressource or document (like Open Calais does). Tom Tague mentioned in the podcast quite often how important disambiguation is to provide the highest quality.
- Some will provide end-points to a given “thing” like a company, a person etc. in addition to free ones like DBpedia, but they always will try to refer to established URIs like the ones in DBpedia or Open Calais URIs, e.g. IBM´s URI @ Calais). Those companies will provide more facts, for example about a person, as those which are available now for free. They will build on the LOD infrastructure and will live in symbiosis with group number 3. They will control to whom additional facts will be given to but they will build exactly on the same interoperable framework as the “Linking Open Data” community does.
- Some companies will build applications on top of the linked data infrastructure. They have two kinds of knowledge: Who has the best end-points to a complex “thing” which consists of a couple of other atomic things (which necessarily exist in the web of data)? Who is interested in such a mashup?
My prediction: One possible business model will be pretty much the same as iTunes is built upon at the moment: You can listen to a song for free – but only a couple of seconds , if you want more, you pay 99 cents.
If you want to know a little bit about Werner Faymann (who is Austria´s prime minister) you go to an application which makes use from DBpedia (or the like) starting at http://dbpedia.org/page/Werner_Faymann.
If you pay 99 cents (or a bit more…) you get even more facts about Mr. Faymann, nicely mash-uped with other facts from the LOD cloud and together with special content from some other linked data sources, produced with relatively low costs due the high interoperability the Semantic Web provides – thanks to W3C and the whole community.
nice post, would be interesting to investigate provenance in this context of billing. If you pay for additional information, this information is not public and must not become public (at least not for a given time frame). Where will it come from? It will be hand-crafted content, very up-to-date, of higher quality… e.g. the APA could let you browse their information very easily and add content and links from other sources.
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Fabulous summary of ideas for business models.
Two thoughts:
- While accuracy matters a great deal in business critical applications where there will be money to be made – financial applications – bloomberg makes a ton today, not sure if this approach would work for the end user. A consumer would be willing to pay for the action on that data .. Here is an example – Today when I book my ticket on BA and then forward my reservation mall to tripit. When checking in I use the option to look at seatguru about the flight. If seatguru somehow knows that the airline and is able to sell an ad for a window or ties up with the airline to get me to buy the seat.. I would gladly pay!
IMHO – Acting on intelligent data is where the money is! Companies that can tie this data to the action will be brokers & end up making money per action!
- ITunes model – Not sure if this model will fly. Facts generally want to be free, we have been used to getting facts for free thanks to wikipedia, google & freebase now. Unless of-course this is intelligent / aggregated data that gives a competitive edge on which one can act on.
May be you can elaborate this idea.
Google today understands this and hence bubbles up intelligent data like movie times, weather, times etc so they prevent the user from going to another site to act on. Every time they prevent a user from leaving their first result page, they put more ads and hence make more money!
Figuring out the kind of actions for each data set is a good way to start … Either ways we live in exciting times, thanks for the post!
Judging from the last 10 years of internet history, I think trying to make money from information is a dead end. I think Wikipedia proved that an open, free source of information will trounce its proprietary competitors, and there’s no reason to think that an open, free “mashup” source won’t do the same thing. In fact, I’d go a step beyond that and say that I don’t think much money can be made on the technology either, since the best semantic/mashup tools available are already either free services (like Google Maps – well, it’s mostly free) or open-source applications (like Semantic MediaWiki).
Where is the money to be made from linked data? I’d say it’s mostly in consulting – creating custom solutions for companies to publish their data internally and to the outside world, and to use outside sources of data.
Selling/Buying facts is a dead end, I agree with Yaron. However, selling/buying unique and interesting facts may not be i.e. selling linked data that has been derived from recommendation algorithms. I know Netflix would buy “smart” data about movies. This is my prediction.
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