Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

As enterprises increasingly create a more social web presence — multiple Twitter accounts covering various aspects of their brand, for example — it’s becoming more important to better leverage those networks to generate some real returns on their investments.

While it’s all well and good to have fans, friends, and followers, businesses ultimately need to see some concrete payoffs from their moves down these paths. For that to happen, they need a way to integrate the information they can glean from these networks — including geospatial data — with their enterprise databases to gain new insights to drive further value for the business.

In most cases today there’s a wealth of data out there — either on these social networks themselves, within the web of linked data, on the web at large, or even within the enterprise itself — that is not being gainfully extracted and used. That’s where startup SmartRealm is hoping to have an impact, with technology that mines all these sources of data, links that information to standard enterprise databases, and presents it to users in easy-to-understand ways. Its KnowledgeSmarts middleware is semantic web-savvy, mashing up and integrating multiple data sources and using ontologies to apply reasoning to them, while its open source social bookmarking component enables a means to organize data bookmarks for users.

The semantic web comes in via the technology’s support for the main semantic web standards — RDF, SPARQL, and OWL– and social content from sources such as FOAF (Frienf of a Friend project for creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do); SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities for enabling the integration of information from these sources); and SKOS (the W3c’s Simple Knowledge Organization System).

As for social content, says Yaser Bishr, co-Founder, executive vp and CTO, “think of the companies that have presence on the web like Dell, Nike, and Lenovo — they have social networks, so they have not only their customers but also followers, friends and fans. They need to gain insight about their social networks to manage them properly, target their message, map to key performance indicators — who is the group of customers most relevant to them in terms of sales or future leads, for example.”

So much information that companies used to maintain about customers and prospects solely in Excel sheets and internal information from CRM and BI tools is already on the social web, he says, so it’s about integrating this information with those enterprise data sources to deliver customized insight.

A fan or follower on Twitter doesn’t want an automated message from a robot who tweets him, Bishr says. That makes it important for companies to have real-time and effective ways to know who is saying what, where these individuals are located, how they are distributed and related to each other and who is the most influential among them, to understand things such as who to respond to and how. That’s a big job, especially as the number of social presence connections companies have explodes — he points to Google as having 45 Twitter accounts, for instance, to cover all the different facets of the company. At some point these models need to be scalable, to help contribute to the costs of maintaining them and ideally to revenue growth, which argues for doing more with the data that is available via these avenues. Dell, for example, recently said it has surpassed $2 million in revenue in Dell Outlet sales attributed to its Twitter activity, but Bishr raises the question of what the real cost was to Dell to help generate that.

“Now that enterprises understand the value of being social and having a social presence, the question is what do I do with it and how do I manage it,” he says. “It’s kind of the next evolution in the cycle from mass marketing and dealing with customers to social interaction and dealing with friends and followers.”

Will that evolution necessarily leverage the semantic web standards SmartRealm’s technology supports? Bishr points out that SmartRealm isn’t necessarily counting on enterprise developers to adopt those standards, which is why it built its systems to support the formats they are most comfortable with, as well, whether that’s Java, RSS feeds, an XML format or something else.

“The goal is to simplify things for them,” he says. “The RDF learning curve is still pretty steep, and a majority of developers or engineers don’t know much about it or aren’t willing to spend time to learn it. We want to hide this complexity and give them what they’re looking for.”

That’s the way to accelerate adoption of the semantic web among the large contingent of systems integrators with well-defined requirements and tasks who need to concentrate on that rather than on semantic web learning curves, he notes.

Helping to drive SmartRealm’s vision with Bishr is Barry Glick, a co-founder of the company who last week took on the title of CEO. Glick’s resume includes having been co-founder, CEO, and chairman of MapQuest (since bought by AOL/ Time Warner) and as CEO of location based services company Webraska Mobile.

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