Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Semantic web technology and standards could have a role to play in the mobile market when it comes to delivering rich contextual information and personal data management applications to users on their smart phones and PDAs.

Nokia, among others, is quite interested in how to semantically link together data to deliver an interesting and useful experience to on-the-go users. Last year the mobile technology leader reorganized into two business units, one focused on mobile phone technology and the other around mobile Internet services.

To scale development of these services and support them across all markets and languages, there has to be a way to support integration with many different information sources and pull that into some common schema that enables the data to be used in many different ways. High integration, high scalability, and high variability presents a challenge, but “this is really big for Nokia,” says Jamey Hicks, distinguished research leader at Nokia. “It’s the way we look for growth in the company.”

Hicks leads the rich context mobile platform development team at Nokia, which is primarily building mobile applications for phones but must also be concerned with how they will interact with PCs, the cloud, and other devices, and how to make those experiences valuable both for voice and data connections. Hicks and his team are exploring the possibilities of what to build on top of various information repositories and what mix of technologies, including old SQL-style databases, will be most useful in joining information from different sources and indexing that well to deliver services, such as personal information management apps, on small devices.

Progress is being made in using semantic web repositories, but there’s a ways to go, though hybrid solutions, such as building triple stores on top of SQL for persistence and indexing, can be used when that makes sense. Nokia, in partnership with MIT and professor David Karger, is exploring the semantic web repository frontier and there are signs that real, unstructured semantic web repositories could perform and scale well, but so far nothing is robust enough upon which to build big web applications. The project, dubbed ConnectingMe, is developing a new application architecture that uses a semantic web information repository and data integration engine along with a user customizable presentation engine.

The crux of it “is still thinking how best to structure the repository to perform well given real applications, so we need to build the real applications and work our way through the problem,” Hicks says. “Let’s build the applications and services that let us collect the data the information repository guys can use to make sure they are building something that works well.”

Semantics — in the more general sense of the word — also has a role to play to move Nokia’s vision of personal information services forward. It’s looking at finding semantic links not explicit in the data, via natural language processing to do entity resolution, such as a particular name in an email refers to a certain person in a contact database, or a certain place name refers to a particular address. For example, it is building as part of a project an application called Rich Map and Organic Indoor Location, based on work it has underway with Seth Teller at MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory).

Such an application aims to deliver on one angle of finding linkages that are semantic but not explicit in the data by, for example, using natural language processing on email sources to find information relevant to a user’s interests and then correlating those interests to events taking place, including their time and location, and plotting those details on a map.

Partially underpinning this is Nokia’s work with another application from CSAIL – Karger’s List.It, a Firefox browser plug-in that enables storage, search and retrieval of personal information — to deliver a mobile phone version of the system. The application originally grew out of a study about what kind of data isn’t captured in information management tools, why not, and how to change that, Hicks says, but the idea is to grow it into something where information can be extracted from, say, an event you note in an unstructured format, link that to a calendar, cross-link that to who else is attending, then map its location, and so on.

It’s important to Nokia to explore making use of these otherwise inexplicit semantic linkages so that it can build mobile Internet services for hundreds of millions of people that help them do what they want and need to do, “and try to address the information management shortcomings we see in the underlying systems and in previous applications,” Hicks says. Other services, such as Jot, tried something similar, and though they may not have succeeded, they point to the fact that there is a need waiting to be filled.

“But you need a very comprehensive solution,” Hicks says. “You have to be able to pull everything in and then interact with all the other applications people use. You can’t make people completely change their habits; you must align with them in a way that helps them. So I am looking for, in terms of building a software platform, the ability to do that, to have lots of different ways of interfacing into the core of a system so different applications and views can be quickly added, and you can pull in almost any kind of information you want to integrate together in a way that works well and that people like to use and that protects data.”

Hicks is pretty confident that the underlying repositories will follow from the technology platform and the concrete vision of what Nokia is trying to achieve.

“We’ll build the applications, get success on the user side and get a better idea of what to improve,” he says. Basically, he sees the work as building a benchmark for large rich information repositories so that there are real workloads to test new systems against. “Once you get to that point, things will fall in place.”

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