Semantic Web Company

The present state of development, future trends and expected market scenarios for Semantic Technologies are shown in the just published “Demand driven Mapping Report”. The report is part of the EU-funded project Value It, which is about bringing together the various stakeholders within the sector: Industry, Research and Government. VALUE-IT preliminary findings show that the STE potential market in Europe will size up to €1.44B for 2014. Scanning furthermore the executive summary of the report, some findings attract attention:

The survey results also show considerable variation by sector, both of policy and technology implementation. With respect to technologies, ICT companies are also the most willing to consider semantic approaches. The ICT sector has an unusually high interest in all ST components, with 20% or more being willing to consider all of them, and over half of IT respondents looking at Web 2.0 (social computing). [...]  The use of tagging technologies – which overall is the least mature approach in the survey – is most advanced in Life Sciences. The Life Sciences, Media & Entertainment, and ICT sectors all have a reasonably strong interest in Natural Language Processing (roughly 25% on average). Ontologies and RDF/OWL are the technologies least often considered, though the interest in these Semantic Technologies is not insignificant. Taxonomies are slightly more popular, perhaps indicating that companies are taking the first step to prepare for a more semantic approach to IT solutions. The ICT, Energy & Utilities, and Media & Entertainment sectors all have a reasonably strong interest in using taxonomies.

The 190 pages report gives an actual overview of the status quo on European Semantic Technology Market and is now available for download: Final demand driven mapping Report

The Semantic Web Company created a series of online seminars (aka webinars) for you to acquire basic and practical knowledge about methologies, technologies and standards of the Semantic Web. In 90 minute sesseions we will cover the business aspects of topics such as content engineering, Knowledge Management, business intelligence, e-Business and more.

In order to allow for a high level of interaction, the attendance is limited to ten participants and ample time for questions and discussion with our experts is designated. Each webinar works as a stand-alone module, so you can pick and choose some of them or book the whole series of 6 webinars.

We’ll kick off with a session about Semantic Wikis on Thursday 22nd of October. A German language version will be held at 9 a.m., alternatively you can atted an English version at 6 p.m. CET.

Each Thursday we cover a different topic such as Semantic Search, Corporate Thesaurus Management, Text Mining on the Corporate Semantic Web, Linking Open Data and Semantic Advertising.

In order to participate you only need broadband access to the internet, Windows or a Mac and a fairly up-to-date browser. For detailed system requirement see the webinar overview.

We hope to talk to you in one or more of these sessions!

Markus Luczak-Rösch and his team from FU Berlin have published loomp, a WYSIWYG annotation tool especially designed for inhouse use. loomp is aiming at the Corporate Semantic Web market, providing a semantic application with low entry barriers and high usability designed for non-techies.

When asked about the concrete application area Markus says:

We have found various use cases especially in knowledge and content intense domains. The most interesting one is the journalists use case. Consider journalists which research and write articles and editors which revise and publish the work of journalists.

Journalists research specific topics on demand and access various information sources for this purpose, e.g. websites, books, related articles, and human informants. Only few journalists use digital devices for this task and even fewer apply information management systems. To transfer the finished article to the responsible editor at the publishing house the people use free text documents and email communication. Finally, an editor revises and releases the articles for his department. loomp can help journalists to manage their notes, interview logs, references, addresses, etc. loomp helps to link an article to its information sources.

Read the full interview here.

In his recent interview Andreas Blumauer (SWC) asked Mario Lenz, from german-based knowledge management solution provider EMPOLIS, about their OS-Initative SMILA. As Lenz explained, SMILA acts within a domain of various approaches and already established solutions re. Enterprise Resource Planning Systems. So, he sees SMILA’s USP in: “a standardized way of representing, accessing and managing those unstructured data which not exist today. Rather, each vendor ships his own, proprietary solution. SMILA’s goals are to define and implement such a standard infrastructure framework and to establish a community bringing it forward.”

Besides an insight in many aspects of the initiative, the interview provides thoughts on how connected business-models, in providing services, could look like.

[read more]

Prof. Adrian Paschke, head of the Corporate Semantic Web Working Group at the Free University of Berlin, gave an extensive interview on promises and challenges of the Corporate Semantic Web addressing methodological, technological and economic aspects. He says:

Corporate Semantic Web addresses both the consumer and the produce side, where consumers and producers might be humans as well as automated services, e.g. in business processes and enterprise service networks. This also includes the adequate engineering, modelling, negotiation and controlling of the use of the (meta)data and meaning representations in a (collaborating) community of users or services in enterprise settings where the individual meanings as elements of the internal cognitive structures of the members become attuned to each others’ view in a communicative process. This allows dealing with issues like ambiguity of information and semantic choices, relevance of information, information overload, information hiding and strategic information selection, as well as positive and negative consequences of actions (e.g. in a decision making process).

But, CSW does not only address the technological aspect but also the pragmatic aspect of actually using Semantic Web technologies in enterprises, which includes learning and training aspects as well as economical considerations. Incentives need to be provided to encourage in-house adoption and integration of these new Corporate Semantic Web technologies into the existing IT infrastructures, services and business processes. Decision makers on the operation, tactical and strategic IT management level need to understand the impact of this new technological approach and its adoption costs and return on investment. Therefore, companies will have in mind the economical justifiability of the deployment of new technologies.

I think he addresses some really crucial aspects of this emerging application field. Read the full interview here.

Corporate Semantic Web will also be a major topic at this year’s I-Semantics Conference from Sept. 2 – 4, 2009 in Graz/Austria. Also check out the forthcoming Semantic Web Meetup in Berlin on March 20, 2009, which is organized by Adrian Paschke’s team and the Semantic Web Company.

It’s fashionable to have a corporate wiki installed at the own company. But often – to speak a word of truth – this wikis are not more than a burial ground of vague project memos. This isn’t a big surprise, because often corporate strategy on innovate wikis into company’s every day life, comes in a simple triple jump: (1) buy some software, (2) get a one-day workshop, (3) write a binding memo to employees to use that wiki. Leaving the process in such a kind, wikis are developing the way that is inherent for them: run riot (optimistic case) or run dry (normal case).

But wikis are extensive and powerful instruments in corporate life. You can plan, communicate, document and control everyday corporate processes with them – within a common environment. So wikis are less a chunk of software, they are more the potential future working environment, where employees are “living in”. So, as careful as we are furnish our offices, we should also setup our virtual working place: The corporate wiki.

Andreas Heilwagen points out some tips on innovate corporate wikis right at “Computerwoche”

• clear rules and responsibilities
• do not start with empty wikis
• so called “champions” have to smooth the way
• change your mind on information processing
• be careful with vendor-specific plugins
• do not outsource to professional information brokers
• everybody should be able to edit (nearby) every page
• get your pages connected intern and extern
• always create useful information which others can reuse

Following my statement at the beginning, I would add:

• get a clear definition about the fields you want to use the wiki for
• identify company’s surplus in having a wiki
• see which tools and services bring some very personnel benefit for the employees

It’s the preparation phase which is essential in the quaetion on how effective the work with a future corporate wiki can be. Vienna based Semantic Web Company exemplary runs through such a preparation phase this days. Getting data, using tools like storytelling, personas and usage scenarios, this may end in a “well equipped working environment of the future” – the corporate wiki.

Retated:

• Oracle Fusion ECM: Enterprise Wiki Strategies

The roll-out of semantic web technologies seems to enter the next stage. And it will be a quiet (r)evolution like the open source movement was. Two examples: Next year´s JAX in Mainz/Germany will have its first Semantic Web track. Organisers say that “the Semantic Web is going to conquer the business market soon” – we will see if it will be that martial.

Another example: One of the biggest Open Source Magazines in Germany, t3n, has recently published its new magazine with many stories around the Semantic Web. Editor in chief, Jan Christe says: “We have constantly stumbled upon semantic web related stuff  when we scanned the news, so we decided to set a focus on this topic.”

The Semantic Web is tangible now – Christe says: “Applications like OpenCalais, Zemanta or Tagaroo show the end-users what´s really in for them.” And it is also nice to see, that the semantic web won´t be reduced down to “search” anymore: t3n´s new issue has also interesting articles about Linked Data, for instance Sören Auer´s “How to develop Semantic Web Applications”.

So, as a conclusion: Paul Miller´s waiting for the “Semantic Web in Business” (a great blog post!) has an end. It won´t be found in heavy books, rather in the open source community and sometimes in light-weight magazines.

Yes, we can!

Well, no. Or maybe not quite. But an innocent reader might have gathered this from the title of David Provost’s recent publication which promisingly read “On the Cusp. Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry.”

Provost’s review is a nice and readable attempt at evangelizing semantic technologies and their adoption by the industry. Its seeks to spread the news outside of the echo chambers and avoids any community jargon and cryptic acronyms irrelevant to strategic decision makers. He really derserves great credits here.

But in the end Provost’s description of a “Semantic Web Industry” is reductionist. By just analysing the commercial availability of technology provided by vendors, the bigger picture of the industry gets blurred. He misses the point when it comes to analysing the actual demands for semantic applications. But they could be easily identified e.g. enabling cost-efficient interoperability and reusability of data. So Provost gets stuck in a supply-driven view of the semantic web industry. And as we have learned from history, supply driven markets – technology markets in special – are extremely vulnerable. Hence concluding that the Semantic Web Industry is on the cusp might seem a little “misworded”.

What might be a nice addition for a follow up study is to look at the commercialization strategies of semantic web technologies and its capitalization logic as a network good. Further on, it might be worth it looking at the value chain of a semantic industry in which vendors just play one (but nontheless important) role and the regulatory aspects involved in rolling out semantic web based business models, i.e. concept advertising. Here you might be easily confronted with antitrust and competition issues very soon, taking into account recent decisions of the German High Court about the bidding on key words in Google AdSense.

Imagine what it would mean if you could bid on concepts and secure them for your private purposes?

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That the Semantic Web is based on “concepts” not on terms is maybe a small but nevertheless mind-blowing insight when it gets to assess its potential for the advertising industry. And this is especially true for semantic search advertising. Scott Provost from Powerset made this very clear when he spoke at this year’s Search Engine Strategies in San Jose. In his words taken from a recent epiphany post:

If people aren’t bidding on keywords and are bidding on concepts, it could completely change the ball game.

A similar point is stressed by Kartal Guner, chief architect of Hakia.com at a Search Engine Rountable on August 18, 2008. Accordingly, Search Engine Optimizers will focus on content not just key words in the near future.