Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Europe is investing aggressively in semantic web research (see Follow the Money, Part 1), but it’s not necessarily those who lay the groundwork that are the most effective at commercializing their efforts. This time, though, things might be different.

Government funding seldom translates into commercial products, points out Dr. Chris Harding, the U.K.-based forum director for SOA and semantic interoperability at The Open Group, a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium committed to enabling access to integrated information within and between enterprises based on open standards and global interoperability. Success will come to those who can match technical possibility with commercial requirements.

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“So far, we only have a fuzzy picture of both of these, but it’s becoming clearer,” Harding said. “The first companies to see it really clearly and match the technology to the commercial requirement will gain significant advantage.”

Many European leaders in semantic web research, in fact, will readily admit that the U.S. historically has had the edge in terms of carrying ideas through and realizing them in successful commercial ventures.

“I don’t think historically Europe has been very good at anything compared to the U.S. in terms of commercialization,” says Dr. John Domingue, deputy director of the U.K.’s Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, which carries out research related to the creation and sharing of knowledge, with one of its big research topics being the semantic web.

Peter Mika, a researcher at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona and co-chair of the 2007 International Semantic Web Conference Semantic Web Challenge, has his thoughts about which commercial ventures are poised to first make a go of things. “My suspicion is that there is more business in the U.S. and more research in Europe,” he says. “The startups that are positioned to have a web-scale impact (Twine, Freebase) are American.”

The U.S. indeed has a much superior culture for starting companies, says Dr. Mark Greaves, director of Knowledge Systems Research at Vulcan at Vulcan, Inc., the private investment vehicle for Paul Allen, where he sponsors advanced research in large knowledge bases and advanced web technologies. And while Europeans acknowledge this, he thinks they’re ready to play a little hard ball this time around.

“In the European semantic web circles, I often hear an explicit theme of competitiveness with the U.S.,” Greaves says. “The web was born in Europe, when Tim Berners-Lee built the first web browser at CERN, but now most of the big web technology companies are in the U.S. Many of my European colleagues don’t want to see this happen again. They see semantic web as an area where robust research can fairly quickly result in a commercial competitive advantage for European companies, and they are investing heavily in this area.”

The sense that the game is on comes through in a conversation with Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University in the U.K. He led the six-year AKT (Advanced Knowledge Technologies) program in the EU to look at next-generation technologies on the web.

“Europe has been good at the applied research piece of it, but now we really want to innovate the exploitation piece.” Certainly that’s true of Garlik, the online identity semantic web start-up of which Shadbolt is also CTO.

“You can take basic ideas that are developed and innovate and extend them or research them some more. I would love to think those who do the research can reap the rewards. In this area the U.K. is good at investing in primary research.”

Those rewards can be pretty massive, according to Michael Belanger, president and co-founder of semantic search vendor Jarg Corp. “The European union is putting 100 to 1 public research dollars into semantic web technologies compared to what we are doing here,” he says. “They are going to become more competitive in terms of quality of information than the U.S. is before we are, and as a result they will probably start to become more competitive as an economy with Asia than we are because of that information mining capability that they are putting 100 times more research into than here.”

And it’s not just about who gets to lead markets. It’s also about who gets to draw from the next generation of talent, as these individuals plot and plan where to advance their careers and even start their companies.

“I see startup companies with world-class talent starting to pop up all over the European Union, including places like Bulgaria and Slovenia which are not traditionally thought of as IT research centers,” Greaves says. In fact, Vulcan’s own Project Halo includes a substantial European team. Project Halo is a long-term Vulcan research and development initiative that aims to develop applications capable of answering novel questions across a broad range of scientific disciplines. It includes a sophisticated semantic wiki being built by a European team led by ontoprise GmbH of Karlsruhe, Germany. “We selected a European team because that’s where the best expertise is in web-scale social semantics,” says Greaves.

Any graduate student wanting to do leading-edge research in semantic web technologies is looking at Europe,” he says. “The programs are well-funded, they have great professors to study under, and the projects are amazingly interesting and ambitious. There are some strong semantic web graduate programs in the U.S., such as the ones at RPI and UMBC, but they are fewer and farther between. It’s very clear to me that in the near term, Europe is going to be at the center of advanced research in semantic technologies.”

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