Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

NEW YORK — It’s a blue ocean out there, with tons of potential. That’s what Ian Davis, CTO of semantic web platform provider Talis, told an audience gathered today at the LinkedData Planet Conference here.

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.

The semantic web, with the possibilities it offers for decreasing the costs of integrating, using and publishing data, while increasing the value derived from publishing it, has big implications for companies, Davis said. It means that there is a wide vista of potential opportunities that can radically change the way enterprises do business and people interact on a social basis.

“There are more ways to link data, to use information and share it among and in a single organization,” said Davis. “What that tends to mean is you get a blue ocean, a metaphor that means the market doesn’t exist yet.”

Not a bad sea to swim in, in contrast to the red ocean, which Davis said is the province of most established businesses today.

“They’re all competing fiercely, the rules of the game known … it’s where the fighting happens. In the blue ocean, we don’t know what will happen. We don’t know how to price things, or what the applications will be, but there is enough room to try things out. Right now we are at the start of a new market.”

His advice to enterprises — many of them often slow to move forward on a trend that asks them to open up their data so that they can exploit these new opportunities — is to start figuring out how they might play in this new space. Because just a decade from now, the new space will be THE space.

“Ten years from now we won’t be thinking of the semantic web, it will just be the web. But a smarter web that has more information,” he said. Think, for example, that just 10 years ago organizations were still arguing about why they even needed a web site, and now no one gives a second thought to this as a means for sharing information and letting more people interact with you.

“So my advice to you here is we’ve got to take the first steps, understand how to go about publishing this data.” A good start is working at how you can innovate around sharing some of the data internally between silos before opening it more broadly.

The open network, Davis said, has always outpaced the closed one (see the old AOL and CompuServe model vs. the open web), because of its ability to continually generate more value as it attracts more participants.

“Because lots of others are already participating in the web, and you could all link to each other, additional value drives this virtuous circle and makes the whole system more valuable. At some point [you get] critical mass — the cost of participation is outweighed by the network [value created].”

And the semantic web has more potential for value generation than the web had before it, he said, because there are more ways to link information, it’s easier to deal with the information you are publishing. “If you are an enterprise or an organization, you now have to think about how is my company going to take advantage of this semantic web thing. What do I need to do now that will give my company the best chance for taking advantage of the value creation that will be created by the semantic web?” Davis said.

And you should keep in mind that it may only be by opening up to the idea of unlocking some of the data that currently is squirreled away within an organization that you may actually be able to drive innovations around that intellectual property. Davis referenced reading recently a book about open business models, which did a case study on some 35 projects that Xerox spun off because it couldn’t figure out how to monetize them.

“Of those, 11 did deliver substantial value back to the company,” he said. “Those companies that it spun out had twice the market cap of Xerox. The innovations Xerox did internally had twice as much value as the company had already created, but couldn’t on their own work out how to innovate their business model to support that.”

A whole new generation of business based on data that’s been locked away for many years may just be waiting to be born.

“And using the semantic web to do this will mean costs will be dramatically lower,” he said. “Those network effects will generate a much bigger market in the long run than you can generate on your own.”

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