Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Dow Jones & Company lives on data. On metadata, that is — it’s been tagging content using taxonomies for decades. Careful management of metadata is the only way for the content producer and aggregator to manage the huge volumes of information it provides to consumers and enterprises. But as early adopters often find, taking the next step forward to embrace emerging technologies is a balancing act undertaken in baby steps.

Learn how the Semantic Web is changing the way we treat data at the LinkedData Planet Conference. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the W3C, is among the event’s keynote speakers.

Managing research and development of metadata and business champion for Synaptica, a metadata management tool, among other responsibilities, is Christine Connors, Global Director, Semantic Technology Solutions. Just recently appointed to the role, Connors explains that many of the legacy and proprietary systems Dow Jones has long used are still fairly robust.

So, “migrating to semantic web standards is about carefully selecting the projects you want to work on, making sure it will support what has come before, as well as be more extensible for the future,” Connors says.

So how does a company with massive amounts of real-time data and high availability requirements migrate to the semantic web?

The answer is: Very carefully. “I refer to it in my head as spiral development, where you move forward and hopefully build on the last round of what you did, and spiral up until you grow,” she says. ” Sometimes you have to take a few steps back to get to the next level. But it’s all got to be carefully planned and executed.”

It’s easy to get carried away with the possibilities that semantic web technologies offer to businesses — but don’t, she says. “You can’t do everything at once. One of the things is that people try to jump in the deep end, and frankly, in a lot of large organizations the deep end can’t scale,” she says, with repercussions on availability and performance. “I would love to ask our technical people to mark up everything to ridiculous degrees, to do cool visualizations and mash-ups internally, I would love that, but it can’t scale.”

At the same time, you won’t have a successful transition unless you make sure that you have a well-formed business case and buy-in from all levels of the organization — from those that make the decision to pay for the technology behind the strategy to those that will have to implement it.

“You need someone who can evangelize internally and externally, and do the R&D on the business case,” is Connors’ advice to those in similar circumstances. Perhaps easier said than done, as it’s not easy to determine the ROI on modeling a knowledge domain. Aside from improving the taxonomy for an e-commerce site to make it easier for customers to browse through categories of goods for sale, thereby likely generating more sales, there are very few cases where you can prove ROI on taxonomy, she says.

That’s why she advocates that aspects of the migration be undertaken as part of a bigger project, “like process efficiency or reduced storage costs. For example, because you applied metadata to an object, as that object ages and isn’t as frequently accessed, it can move to a lower cost storage solution. You need someone to think through these squishy numbers. There are rarely hard dollar savings,” says Connors.

As organizations assemble their semantic web teams, they need, of course, the editorial expertise — those individuals who are really good at modeling knowledge domains — as well as the technical experts who understand how to build and manage these systems. Dow Jones has that thanks to its Factiva division having acquired Synapse and its taxonomy management consulting practice and taxonomy management tool Synaptica (for which Connors is also the business champion).

But it’s not just about knowing the technology. “You need several technology people who understand data, who understand that at the end of the day, companies care about data, not software code.”

She also emphasizes the vital contributions made by designers who worry about the aesthetics and interaction within the user interface.

“A pet peeve about the semantic web is that there are some really impressive tools out there, but they are so academic the average person doesn’t get it. We need to lower the bar of adoption,” says Connors. “We need the academic type people to continue doing their research, but we need to make the interfaces so darned simple to use, or people won’t get on board with it.”

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