Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Paradigm5, a new semantic web-based business networking tool, launched June 16, and the next day at the Linked Data Planet conference in New York City, Marcus Trevisani, CTO at Relevant Digital, talked about the new service.

Paradigm5.com is powered by the semantic technology company’s Discovery Engine. Relevant Digital’s Discovery Engine is billed as a matching technology that enables users to find, retrieve and use data on the Internet and corporate enterprise databases more effectively.

“We need a way to represent resources in a fundamentally common way, and to identify resources whatever they may be,” said Trevisani. “With the advent of the semantic web, linked data and RDF triples, there’s a perfect way to be able to do that.”

The issue with broad-scale semantic search as it typically exists, he said, is that there’s too much information, making the task time-intensive and laborious.

“Search involves your full attention, you are locked in front of that engine spending time trying to get results,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be better if there were some system that could do that for you? That you would broadcast some request and the system would go out and find it, tell you when it has found it, bring it back to you without your having to sit there and be captive to that process? That’s what semantic discovery is – systems that perform semantic resource matching based on resources or requests and [that issue] recommendations on a continuous basis. It’s an agent that continually monitors its environment. You end up getting asynchronous, continuous and relevant action.”

Trevisani contends that many businesses can be built from this model – pushing ahead the concept of monetizing the semantic web, which hasn’t been fully realized yet. That includes enterprise collaboration – for example, applications could be built to retain the knowledge of laid-off workers in this age of merger and acquisition activity.

“M&A…it’s usually a cut-and-run attempt to reduce staff. Then they realize they lost a lot of knowledge,” he said. “If there was an application that could take the profile of every user, the documents they worked on, and index them and then have them stored continually in the system and active, that knowledge is never lost. Even if they are laid off, you can ask them questions related to business transactions. It gives you the ability to avoid a lot of the inefficiencies that come about when you merge companies together.”

Social networking applications can also be built on top of this model, enabling comparison of profiles between individuals for shared identities and interests.

“By identifying semantic objects and resources in such a way that they can interoperate, you start to provide solutions to many different industries,” he said.

Paradigm5.com is one effort to provide a solution for business collaboration. It’s the first major launch of a system built on the latest version of Relevant Digital’s platform.

The exchange, a closed semantic system, connects subscribers (businesses that need something, such as a J2EE developer) with those that can offer something like Java development services). It continually and intelligently matches people with business needs to those with targeted business solutions.

Of course, this isn’t the first time efforts have been undertaken to enable global B2B collaboration, and audience members questioned whether semantic discovery offers a better alternative to past registry efforts, such as ebXML or UDI. Trevisani says yes, though there’s a trade-off between accuracy and timeliness that gets made for solutions built on the platform.

“We think make it more flexible, make it asynchronous. Results may not come back straight away; it may be two days time,” he said. “We let the user know we are making assumptions that this is a good match,” though algorithms can be changed on how those assumptions are made if necessary.

“The way we wanted to approach this is the ability for the semantic web to truly be the integrating thing that brings these systems together,” he said. “I think — and I think we all do — that this will happen. But we need to focus on our internal applications to get the job done, and then look at some point in time at this amazing explosion of interactivity between these systems.

“But let’s not look at that first. Some semantic search sites haven’t done well because they have tried to look at the big problem: Turn the world’s data into semantic data. The way to approach the problem is through isolated, application-specific environments where there is a direct benefit to a customer or a business, and they shouldn’t even know if it’s semantic [technology].”

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