Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Project 10X, a research consultancy specializing in next wave semantic technologies and solutions, recently published its report “Semantic Wave 2008: Industry Roadmap to Web 3.0.” And indeed it does see semantic technologies as one powerful wave.

“Over the next decade,” according to the report, “web 3.0 will spawn multi-billion dollar technology markets that will drive trillion-dollar global economic expansions to transform industries as well as our experience of the internet.”

Authored by Project10X founder and managing director Mills Davis, some highlights of the report include:

1. Multiple ways in which semantic technologies drive value, by creating:

Economies in development that reduce the time, risk and cost to developing and evolving services and capabilities;

Intelligent user interfaces that lead to significant gains in communications effectiveness, service delivery, user productivity, and user satisfaction;

Systems that learn during operation, improving system lifestyle economics such as less frequent upgrades of software components;

Semantic ecosystems that can grow dynamically, self-evolve, self-organize and self-protect. “Web 3.0,” the report summary says, “will lay the foundation for ubiquitous web including autonomic intellectual property, web-scale security and identity management, and global micro-commerce in knowledge-based assets.”

2. The impact of semantic technologies on driving innovations in new services or solutions around:

The user experience, where intelligence and context-awareness will lead to more dynamic, advisory, proactive and autonomic interactions;

Social computing, where the addition of knowledge representation to data, processes, services and software functionality will enrich social applications ranging from instant messaging, to blogging to social networking to do-it-yourself applications;

Semantic applications, where knowledge is put to work in commercial off-the-shelf-software, ontology-driven discovery in vertical industries and real-time document analysis, and in risk, compliance and policy driven processes such as fraud case management and emergency response; the semantic infrastructure

Semantic infrastructure, where adding a knowledge dimension to networks, facilities, services and installations that underlie internet-based communities provides solutions to problems of integration, interoperability, mobility, scale, complexity, and more. “Longer term,” writes Davis in the report summary, “the trend is towards everything becoming connected, somewhat intelligent, somewhat self-aware, socially autopoeitic, and autonomically capable of solving problems of complexity, scale, security, trust and change management.”

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Semantic development, where the process is business and user driven rather than IT and developer driven, and knowledge is extracted and modeled separately from documents, schemas and program code, resulting in fast, iterative and non-invasive build cycles, that take less time, cost less money, and are less risky in terms of deployment, maintenance and upgrades.

3. The enterprise market for commercial off-the-shelf software changes. “Service-oriented architectures become semantic SOA. Semantic solutions for managing structured and unstructured information are hot. Changes that impact application concept of operations, and add intelligence to the user interface, will come next,” Davis notes.

4. Adoption of semantic technologies in industry verticals. The report makes a persuasive case that “semantic wave markets are here and now,” noting some 150 case examples — nearly three-quarters of them private companies — in 14 industry sectors where semantic technologies are being used for everything from digital asset management to e-learning to meta-searching to risk and compliance management to customer support.

A summary of the report is available at the company’s web site.

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