As the former Chief Information Officer of Europe’s largest internet bank, Egg plc, the decision to select semantic technologies to underpin the launch of my next large scale consumer business, Garlik (www.garlik.com), was not one I took lightly.
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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor
What might begin to bloom as an online advertising trend for 2008? According to Exponential Interactive Inc., a technology-enabled media services company focused on the online space, users may begin to experience the results of marketers leveraging the store of user data that will be created in the wake of the growth of semantic web-enabled and social services such as Twine, Yoono, and Stumbledupon.com.
The company — whose businesses include the Tribal Fusion advertising network and EchoTopic, which uses indexing and a very basic semantic component to deduce a web page topic and to suggest relevant ads presented via contextual links — recently released its list of 2008 advertising trends. The list included the realization of personalization, the coming of age of targeted online videos, new local advertising platforms, better measurements of online campaign effectiveness, the growth of niche virtual worlds — and the prediction that semantic tools will attract advertising bucks as marketers use semantic analysis to create a more relevant experience for online users.
Exponential’s prediction around semantic technology — as new services begin or continue to drive communities of users who structure and share their online experiences — is “in all candor, of all our trends, the one that is probably more bleeding-edge,” says Alistair Goodman, Exponential VP of strategic marketing, who created the list. “But it just struck me that I’m hearing more and more about it from mainstream, non-technical folks, which is the early indicator of a potential trend.”
And it could be a game-changing trend. “If you think about the potential of a number of people being connected through the information they are consuming and the many things they do on line and off line — that is the leap in terms of where marketing is going,” Goodman says. “It needs to connect into that, vs. hitting them over the head with popup or banner ads, which is a very simple way of marketing.”
Goodman says that in the last year sites such as Twine, Yoonoo and del.i.cio.us have started to get a lot of buzz with media buyers and planners — even if the term “semantic” in and of itself has not. “The uber-trend in online marketing now is that we have so much anonymous user data, and we are much better at building models to use that data to deliver more relevant online marketing experiences to people. This is a treasure trove of data that at some point someone is going to, from a marketing perspective — because marketers just can’t help themselves — figure out how to leverage,” Goodman says.
How? Goodman suggests that marketers might start with the one-percenters, for example — the active and engaged people in any sector of interest, whether it’s stockholding or snowboarding — to begin to create a community they can leverage to take a compelling idea and grow it in a more viral way, at the same time as they are sharing information with the community.
“This idea [that with semantic technologies] that I can plan a trip to North Africa on the web, having researched it for several months, and when my friend goes a few months later I can share this information with that person, and they can share it with100 other people who can add to it and enrich it — the ability to do that so quickly and so easily now is what marketers are trying to harness and access.”
Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor
This year saw the largest number of entries ever for the Semantic Web Challenge, an event held at the Sixth International Semantic Web Conference in Busan, Korea. There were nineteen entries, up from fourteen last year — as well as an increase in the accessibility of the applications, and the number of them that converge the worlds of the semantic web and Web 2.0. That all says a few things to Peter Mika, a former winner himself of the Semantic Web Challenge and co-chair of the 2006 and 2007 competitions.
“What I take away is that it’s becoming easier to develop semantic web applications, and that’s because of the tools that we have,” says Mika, also a researcher at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona. “That’s a very good thing, because it used to be a huge problem, that a lot of these technologies really required PhDs to understand. Now things are maturing, there are a lot more easy-to-use tools, documentation, and examples to build on.”
This year’s entries, as in past years, reflect the competition’s mission of taking semantic technology to the open web, where it can be accessible to everyone at web-scale, instead of semantics as applied to enterprise applications and closed-loop environments.
To that end, the applications must meet the minimum criteria to be considered for the Semantic Web Challenge: 1) being designed for end users (rather than being a tool or a component); 2) of using the meaning of data in some sense; and 3) of making use of heterogeneous distributed data — that is, using at least two different data sources that are not under direct control of the person developing the application. But because of the preponderance of data in closed-domain applications, entries to date have included those focused on closed-domain applications, where competitors build on a limited number of resources that use rich ontologies, and which can use much more reasoning power.
Next year, the competition’s organizers will be pushing even harder on the open web side of things, because they have gained sponsorship to add a second competition.
“The idea is we get a billion triple data sets from the web, real world data from linked data, microformats, whatever we can find. Really messy, dirty data, and give it to people and tell them to do something with it,” says Mika. “If you’re into cleansing of data, try to clean it; if you’re into ontology mapping, try to find possible mappings. So it’s pushing the scale, pushing the openness, pushing a few points that we see are missing.”
I started this column with the message that "the future of the Web is: identifiers, relationships and services." Identifiers are the magic gear that make the others work, and so, having in the previous article introduced the role of identifiers in the Internet, I’ll expand on the theme to discuss how important identifiers are, even in an organizational setting.
Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor
The results are in from the Semantic Web Challenge 2007, an annual event held at the Sixth International Semantic Web Conference in Busan, Korea. The challenge is designed to help illustrate what the semantic web can provide and to help stimulate research in the area. Nearly 20 applications were submitted, and it’s interesting to see their breadth and scope.
Consider the winners of this year’s awards:
Submitted by KMi, The Open University, it transparently generates machine-readable RDF metadata for the semantic web, based on human user input. According to the paper submission for Revyu.com, the design aim was to maximize the reuse of external data sources and enable less structured human input, with human-oriented mash-ups enabled by creating links to external sources such as DBpedia. The paper states that Revyu.com is an attempt to overcome the fact that user reviews are mostly isolated in particular silos, with no easy way to aggregate all reviews of a particular item in one place.
“Revyu takes a significant and concrete step towards solving this problem by exposing reviews as linked data using standards such as RDF and SPARQL. In doing so, it helps to create an ecosystem of interlinked reviews and ratings on the web, and to bootstrap the semantic web as a whole,” the paper’s authors write.
It aims to deliver “an instant gratification demonstration of the semantic web’s benefits … rather than thinking hard about proper ontologies or writing functional descriptions of data transformation, users visually manipulate the data until it looks right for their purposes.”
At the recent W3C / WSRI "Toward More Transparent Government Workshop on eGovernment and the Web," it was stated that U.S. Government data is not readily accessible to search engines and reuse projects and that major government data projects need an enterprise data architecture for funding. The Federal Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP), established by a group of individuals for the purpose of achieving "semantic interoperability" and "semantic data integration" focused on the government sector, is working on both of these problems in the Federal Sitemaps Initiative and by participation in the follow-on W3C "Workshop on RDF Access to Relational Databases." An early version of this article was presented at the October 25-26, 2007, W3C Workshop on RDF Access to Relational Databases, Boston, MA, USA.
If you are looking for a local restaurant recommendation, you are likely to end up on one of the many "restaurant review" sites on the Web. Popular restaurants have large numbers of user reviews and the not so popular ones have fewer or none. If you were looking in San Francisco, you’d likely end up with too many reviews and options to choose from and almost no user reviews to make a decision on if you were looking for a place in Gilroy, CA (50 miles south of San Francisco). Local businesses are fragmented by nature, and so is the content. BooRah (as in "boo" and hur"rah") takes a semantic approach to solving this fragmentation problem. BooRah’s platform consists of a semantic crawler and a sentiment analyzer (natural language based).
I’m weighing in in favor of Web 3.0 as an alias for the Semantic Web. I know there are a lot of people who will roll their eyes and initiate some anti hype exorcism, but let’s have a sober look at the pluses and minuses here.
Web 3.0 is not without its problems. The first is that everyone is defining it to their own ends. As Montoya Herald summed it up at http://www.christianmontoya.com/2007/10/08/web-30-i-about-money/, Web 3.0 is essentially whatever each of the companies that used the term are working on next. The second problem is that it does pander to the hypemeisters. But the very people who decry hype the loudest are often those who benefit from it the most .(Who can argue that the hype of the Web and Web 2.0 didn’t advance the careers and opportunities of the very people who now think Web 3.0 is hype?)
A lot of people seem to be comfortable with Web 2.0 now, despite the fact that it has no real unifying principle. Web 2.0 is blogs and wikis and Facebook and MySpace (user-generated content) and AJAX and Rich Internet Applications for a richer user experience in a browser, but really there isn’t anything holding it together or giving it a defined shape.
Maybe we don’t need to call the Semantic Web: Web 3.0. But if we don’t, some other marginal improvement in an existing technology will claim the moniker. In other words, there will be a Web 3.0 and we will find ourselves explaining to people, “Well, yes, but that is just a part of the vision…”
Isn’t the term “Semantic Web” good enough? It’s good for the population that is already “in the tent,” but it suffers from being the next big thing for too long for many others. Many people have discounted what they believe the Semantic Web to be (often by making up things that it isn’t and then objecting to that straw man). Web services suffered from a similar fate for a long time, as thought leaders confused it with services delivered over the web (Software as a Service, for instance) which it has some things in common with, but the two aren’t the same. For some, calling the Semantic Web: Web 3.0 gives an opportunity to take another look.
So, I’m coming down in favor of “Web 3.0 = Semantic Web.” What do you think?
I’m weighing in in favor of Web 3.0 as an alias for the Semantic Web. I know there are a lot of people who will roll their eyes and initiate some anti hype exorcism, but let’s have a sober look at the pluses and minuses here.
Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor
It’s time to stop looking at semantics as an academic topic, and time to start considering it in terms of the cost-savings and increased agility that semantic technologies may enable, one expert says.
Specifically, semantic web technologies potentially could solve a big problem that the growing move to service-oriented architectures (SOA) has brought into focus: Information interoperability.
“As SOA has enabled a better information flow within the enterprise — and instead of having silo’d applications you have services that are loosely coupled and enable information to go between them — the need for those services to interpret the information in a consistent way has become more and more obvious,” says Dr. Chris Harding, forum director for SOA and semantic interoperability at The Open Group. The Open Group is a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium committed to enabling access to integrated information within and between enterprises based on open standards and global interoperability.
“SOA is an improvement, a huge improvement, on previous architecture styles,” with a clear impact on making the enterprise more agile, Harding says. “But they could get a further big step change in improvement by addressing the semantic issues within SOA.”
Harding is careful to note that he isn’t 100 percent convinced that semantic web technologies are the exact right way to address this issue, leaving the door open to variations on the theme or completely different options. Nor is there conviction yet in the enterprise architecture community that are the core constituents of The Open Group that this is the specific way to solve their interoperability problems.
But Harding does think organizations should be putting time and effort into understanding the semantic web’s specifications, such as RDF and OWL, and gaining more experience in the area. Not that that’s a piece of cake.
“I think that as a concept that it is quite difficult to understand,” Harding said. “I think the W3C has actually written a very excellent set of specifications for RDF and OWL and so on, but it’s not what you call light reading. It does actually take a degree of intellectual effort to understand what these things are about, and I don’t think they are yet packaged in a way where the general readership can appreciate them.”
The Open Group may have a role to play here in helping to package this for the technical staff, as it publishes the TOGAF framework, an industry standard architecture framework that organizations can freely use to develop an information systems architecture for use within that organization.
“But in addition to the technical people, the business people are providing the money for all this, after all, and they need to understand this is a useful thing to invest money in,” Harding says. You might propose spending the money on developing an ontology of your business terminology to post on a web site, “but I’m not sure that a lot of people will put their hands on their hearts and say if you spend $100,000 on that this year, you’ll get a return of $500,000 next year,” he says.
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