Our experts’ insight into the very near future continues from here….

Where Search is Heading, Where Data is Going

Starting with 2010, I think the most significant event was Google’s acquisition of Freebase.

The number one search player voted for the importance of the Semantic Web with dollars and this is a significant win for the space and a sign that it has matured.

In terms of expectations, we can, in the near term, expect more relevant search results and possibly ranking of related topics coming directly from Google. Other uses of Freebase are possible as well, in terms of doing complex queries that aren’t easy to do using statistical algorithms like Page Rank.

Beyond that, we should see progress along two dimensions — one is on-the-fly transformation of non-structured data into structured and second one is intelligent programs that actually take advantage of structured information. Regarding the first one, we are still in the world where Freebase is mostly static, while Google search is dynamic. Bridging the gap where structured information is created on an ongoing basis, and perhaps on-the-fly, is important.

And then I think we are going to see more agent based systems re-appear. As information gets more and more structured it is only a matter of time before agent-based software comes to the spotlight. This time, the key will be simple/clean UX/UI and crystal-clear focus on a vertical problem to make sure it  has a chance for mass market adoption. – Alex Iskold, founder and CEO, AdaptiveBlue

From conversations with publishing companies in New York City I can also see a small number of large news, media and publishing clusters emerge that will finally provide high quality and up-to-date structured meta-data for professional re-use. — Marco Neumann, CEO, Kona (see more in his blog here)

I think the most significant thing I see happening in 2011 is the full release of Drupal 7 with embedded RDFa. This has taken some time to happen, but release candidate 1 was published a few days ago and we should expect Drupal 7 final shortly.  See here.

Google’s Rich Snippets has been around for a while now, and there are some large sites producing RDFa data, but we also need to see a long tail of RDFa adoption for Rich Snippets and similar initiatives to take off. When hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands!) of Drupal 7 sites come online, we are going to see a lot of RDFa data out there to consume and reuse.  The obvious use is in terms of search results and enhancement, and SEO, but I’m more interested to see what others will come up with.

For the search engines to aid with meaningful search results, I’d hope that Google and others will move quickly to index all the relevant RDFa data from these Drupal sites via SIOC, FOAF, SKOS and DC. Blog posts will contain metadata about creation times, subjects and topics. It will be possible to get some basic or advanced information about the creators of both articles and comments, depending on whether people are logged in or not. This structured data about site content won’t be limited to the past 15 or 20 posts as in an RSS feed – for any and every Drupal page you crawl, you’ll be able to obtain the metadata about that page. This could be the number of replies, the topics, who made the page, when it was last modified, etc.

For what others may come up with, we can imagine topic aggregators where Drupal content, tagged with a certain skos:Concept or some related skos:Concept(s), is brought together from many sites, perhaps leveraging DBpedia to coalesce related topics. We could have visualisations of distributed Drupal sites, clustering together by topic, perhaps showing hot spots based on activity levels for different topics using creation / modification / comment dates and times. We could see sites where there are lots of people posting a little, or many sites where a few dedicated people post quite often, based on FOAF information provided by Drupal. – John Breslin, Lecturer and researcher at NUI Galway, Creator of SIOC

Semantics and the Social Web

In 2010 the big trends were the acquisition of several of the remaining first-generation Semantic Web companies and their products: including my own Twine.com, and Metaweb’s Freebase. We also saw both Google and Bing add faceted search to their homepage search interfaces. And we witnessed the launch of Factual.com and FindTheBest.com, which both demonstrate ways to add more structured data to the Web. Wolfram Alpha continued to grow their curated data sets. I think the next frontier for the Semantic Web is the real-time web, also called the social web. I am working on a project (currently called Bottlenose; in private alpha) that may provide some useful new structure to the social web, for example. For 2011 we may see more structure appearing in social web services. –Nova Spivack, CEO of Lucid Ventures and LiveMatrix

Online Ads: Public Pressures, Real-Time Bidding, Brand Advertiser Buy-In Change Landscape

We believe that the growth of Real-Time Bidding and the increasing government pressure on audience data targeting will drive a renewed interest in relevancy via semantic targeting. With the technological ability to semantically analyze and categorize 1000 URLs per second, Real-Time Bidding will satiate the market’s desire for a pervasive and valuable data points on every impression. In addition, we believe that Real-Time Bidding will also bring larger brand advertisers into online ad exchanges and other emerging ad platforms. This trend will make 2011 the year where semantic ad targeting crosses the tipping point. – Andy Ellenthal, CEO, Peer39

Do Not Track – will be a signature policy issue for 2011 in the online ad world.  While Congress, the FTC and the public will be saying “enough already;” advertisers, ad networks and ad associations will fight to keep behavioral targeting.  Look for Opt-out efforts to not go far enough and the rise of Opt-In proponents as a default instead.  The challenge for the industry will be to sacrifice the behavioral targeting providers for the sake of all others in the online ad industry or to resist changes.  Resisting changes runs the risk of having something more draconian legislated upon the industry.  Look for the rise of alternative targeting means that do not rely on tracking, cookies or invasion of privacy.  We think semantic targeting will be one of these in 2011. Creativity for Brand Advertisers – as brand advertisers are under-represented in the online ad world, look for their increasing participation in 2011.  Once brand advertisers can see, feel, test and get immediate feedback on how their concepts will be matched online with content, they will participate at higher rates.  Exchanges, RTB platforms and the like are not set up to do this now but they could be.  Semantic ad matching technology is more in tune with how media planners and creative strategists think.  Look for smart interfaces that can put control of the ad matching technology at the disposal of the brand advertiser – done well this opens new vistas of sales in online ads from brand players. Transparency, Simplification, Consolidation & $14 Billion – The online ad ecosystem is complicated; data providers, networks, exchanges, buy-side and sell-side platforms and now Real-Time Bidders.  Each is specialized yet purports to integrate with all others.  Advertisers and their agencies need rocket scientists to know how to spend their money well.  The call for transparency in the ever-faster ad buy and sell world is already underway.  Look for it to accelerate in 2011 as buyers and sellers demand to know how, where and when an ad was matched, placed and clicked.  You should expect the big money flowing into the ad ecosystem to generate consolidation and simplification as firms are bought, merged and consolidated.  2010 was supposed to be a shake-out in the networks as the economy tanked.  It didn’t happen.  As ad spending rebounds those with money will buy out and build into larger one-stop shops for advertisers and agencies. – J. Brooke Aker, CMO, ADmantX

Governments’ Hands In It All

At the moment it seems one of the driving force is essentially e-government government data. The U.S. and U.K. were first really doing that…but new ones are coming up. I know there are projects starting up in France similar to what the U.K. has done. I know there are some discussions on EU the level. So the excitement around that is certainly there. Obviously there is some political part of this, not just the semantic web, about having data out in the open. That said. I don’t know, to be honest, what the effect of all this Wikileaks drama will have. Obviously that raises a number of questions and there are pretty strong reactions on both sides about various types of data being around. Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Activity Lead, W3c

Last year I said that tension will increase between government and private sector and ask, Is semweb govweb? This too was a powerful trend. Governments in the west are sizing down by necessity, which could be aligned well with semantic web, but so far most of the effort I see is still with free gov data and employment of a lot of researchers who are enjoying all the benefits, which doesn’t support much of an economy.—Mark Montgomery, founder and CEO, Kyield

Challenges, Obstacles, and Things That Go Bump in the Night

2010 did not turn out to be a killer year for the Semantic Web unfortunately. It’s like Waiting for Godot.

I think that the semantic web will be more “inside” than outside in 2011. Anything semantic is really an enabler for something else. I know for us, we’re lightening the load on semantic extractions because there comes a point of diminishing returns on how much effort you want to exert to precisely tag content. It appears that end-users have not cared so much about the pure semantic label. They want a medium, but not heavy dose of it.

There’s definitely a continued separation between Semantic Technologies and the Semantic Web. As much the Semantic Web’s vision is superb and well articulated by Tim Berners-Lee, it seems to be stuck in a corner due to technical implementation complexities. Its biggest benefits are seemingly with big enterprises, but those have few IT resources that are versed in these technologies. The ray of hope is around Gov 2.0/Open Gov/Open Data initiatives, and it would be good to see significant implementations around these areas. Scientific/medical applications is perhaps another segment that has promise for it. — William Mougayar, CEO, Eqentia

In general, I feel the semantic web community as a whole is far too focused on manual curation of data.  This means manually updated linked data sets, markup [of] individual web pages or documents, etc.  This is not a scalable approach.  Additionally, the semantic web is still confined to being understood and used by a very technical group of people.  Wide-scale adoption of the semantic web requires providing non-technical users the ability to automatically convert existing documents to semantic form, as well as clearly demonstrating the benefit of doing so.  This requires (a) tools to convert data to semantic structures and (b) tools that provide utility to content owners.  There are niche providers for both (a) and (b), but I can only assume that the benefits of the semantic web are not general enough yet, since we haven’t yet seen wide-scale adoption. -- Shion Deysarkar, CEO, 80legs

[Ed Note: Now for the counterpoint:] There are some obstacles: One is that in spite of all the good work being done there is this myth or fallacy of presenting the semantic web as being an overly complicated and difficult-to-understand and difficult-to-manage technology. There have been lots of messaging mistakes in the past but a lot of us have spent quite a lot of time trying to get them out of the way, but they are still around.

Another is that is we are still trying to create a proper bridge between the semantic web community and technology solutions and the web developers’ community. There are mutually missing information – and misinformation as well – missing technologies that have to be somehow taken care of.  – Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Activity Lead, W3c

I think we’re at a critical point for personal information. As I have mentioned in my blog posts, companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple are creating information platforms that are “push” based, won’t scale, and will be controlled by corporate interests. And they are getting stronger all the time, aided by the mainstream press, which can’t see significant developments on the edges, like out here on the open web or semantic web. We’ve shot ourselves in the foot by crying “wolf” too early, and now that the wolves are actually gorging themselves, we’re out in the woods where no one can hear us. It’s bad. We need to respond. I hope 2011 is the year we all get together and build a common framework so we can work toward a common goal. Watch my blog (ThePowerofPull.com) and PersonalDataEcosystem.org for news and developments. – David Siegel, entrepreneur and author, The Power of  Pull

Photo: Flickr/srqpix

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