Semantic Web as Competitive Advantage

By SemanticWeb.com on October 15, 2007 5:18 PM

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

When Tom Ilube left his post as CIO of Egg, the U.K.’s first online bank, it was with the intention of founding another large-scale company aimed at meeting an emerging consumer need and built on an emerging technology with practical potential. The result is U.K.-based, identity-protection firm Garlik, which weekly sweeps the web and presents to some 60,000 consumers a multi-sourced picture of potential identity fraud risks and how they might address them, and it’s underpinned by semantic web technologies.

Ilube, CEO of Garlik, is betting that this decade’s emerging technology will be as strategically important to the success of his company as Internet technologies were to Egg. Ilube first had to convince himself that the web in the next five years
will shift fundamentally from the document web to a data
web, where the meaning of that data is made explicit in some semantic form.
Next, he had to determine whether semantic web technologies could scale to
industrial-strength levels, given expectations that Garlik’s customer base
will grow and the fact that personal information on the web is, at the
least, doubling every year.

“What is important is, what combinations of information make you more or less exposed. It’s not just that I found your name there or date of birth or mother’s maiden name here, it’s that if all of those are available, even in different places, then suddenly I have enough information to take over your identity,” says Ilube. “We highlight that by looking at multiple sources online and give some meaning and context, to highlight what puts you at risk and whether that risk is low, medium, or high.”

Ilube knew that he would need to scale to billions of triples, the relationships among entities expressed in RDF format — and today, Garlik’s semantic store scales to 60 billion of them, with capacity beyond that. The company has implemented its technology across about 100 lightweight, low-cost Linux boxes strung together so that it can easily scale horizontally, one server at a time.

“It’s very different architecting a large corporate system where essentially the boundaries are known, even if it’s a large company, versus designing and building a genuine web-based consumer system where you don’t know the boundaries,” he says.

The third and final question Ilube had to consider was perhaps the most important. “For the problem area I was engaged in (the question was), would this set of technologies give me a genuine advantage over other ways of trying to deliver solutions?” Ilube says. “I concluded they would.”

Not today, necessarily, but over the next few years — as customer demands evolve and the environment becomes more complex — Ilube expects that semantic technologies will provide the best foundation for Garlik to quickly deliver new services.

From his experience as a CIO, Ilube knows just how critical it is to build a flexible infrastructure that can change to meet new business requirements. Back at the bank, he recounts, whenever anyone wanted to change or add a field to the customer database, it would immediately cause a panic.

“The last thing we wanted to do was mess with the underlying database, because that meant retesting all the applications. With (semantic web) technologies, it seems to be remarkably easy and flexible to change the underlying schema, the ontology, the information in the semantic store to take in new sources of information and convert it into RDF format without causing nearly as much pain or harm to the applications that make use of that database. That’s a real breakthrough for us,” Ilube says. The degree of regression testing necessary to ensure that everything still works is seriously decreased, he notes.

This all frees Garlik to change the user experience as needed, to include more sources from the ever-growing list of government databases, social networking sites or anywhere else, for example. “Because this is an emerging area, how consumers relate to the information and what consumers find useful and don’t-that user experience is evolving constantly. It needs to keep changing,” he says. “Knowing that we can add, take away, or change the user experience freely, without worrying about the impact on old versions that might be running in parallel or on the stability of the system as a whole, gives us a degree of freedom. That’s useful today and will be even more so over the next couple of years.”

Garlik’s services are available to consumers in the U.K. either direct or through distribution partners. It just signed a deal with CPP Group Plc, which has 10 million customers, to provide Garlik services within future identity protection product releases.

“That will really start to stretch the technology and see how it performs under some really heavy consumer loads,’ says Ilube.

Technology to combat fraud needs to get smarter, because the fraudsters certainly are. Ilube refers to a study Garlik recently conducted with fraudsters, where one criminal noted that it used to take weeks to find enough information to steal someone’s identity, and with the Internet they can do the job in a couple of hours. “In a sense the bad guys are using semantic web ideas already, in that they are combining multiple sources of information. They may be doing it manually, by sitting in front of a computer and going to different sites.” He doesn’t expect that the fraudulent community will begin themselves investing in large-scale semantic technologies, but that doesn’t mean consumers should under-estimate the threat.

Says Ilube, “At the moment it is relatively ad hoc and manual, but over the coming years, as more and more information gets scattered around the digital world and fraudsters realize its value, we will see a more methodical approach from that community to take advantage of it.”

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