Marjorie Teresa R. Perez of the Business Mirror recently questioned what data will look like in 2013. She writes, “There are many, many people who talk about this issue. For instance, Director, Market Insight and Strategy at Amdocs Michal Harris—who is awesome, by the way—says that we’re going to see a move away from service providers just worrying about the operational challenge of managing data to operators beginning to realize the business opportunity that big data brings. And if you look at the trends toward data and video traffic, you can see that the number of people enjoying LTE coverage is going to skyrocket in the next couple of years. Unlike the Web today, the semantic Web won’t just reside within computers, laptops and mobile devices. Instead, it will be part of electronics like refrigerators, cars and televisions.” Read more

The business side of the Semantic Tech and Business Conference was on display at the closing session today. Panelists shared their own takeaways, pointers, advice, observations and predictions about a number of semantic web issues about bringing semantic technology to the enterprise.

The panelists included  Craig D Hanson, Director, Innovation and Architecture Amdocs.; James Hendler, Professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Arnaud Le Hors, software standards architect at IBM; Dave McComb, President, Semantic Arts Inc; Marie Wallace
Social Analytics Strategist, IBM; Joe Devon, web developer and consultant; Christine Connors, Principal TriviumRLG LLC; and David Booth, an independent contractor and senior software architect at PanGenX.

Here’s an overview of what they had to say to – and for — the enterprise community:

Read more

Semantic technologies of various flavours have the potential to discover connections and enable insights that are powerful, valuable, intriguing, insightful, and surprising. However, as with so many technologies, there’s a flip side. As tools grow more capable and data sets continue to blossom, it becomes ever more likely that the segmented lives of web users — whether public and private, law-abiding and nefarious, or respectable and risqué — will be joined up without our explicit consent. As developers who see the best in people build ever-richer tools, technology companies that cannot — or will not — understand the value of the ageing legal system’s checks and balances continue to use them in pushing the boundaries of what society considers to be acceptable. There are already scare stories, and as the reality becomes more capable, those scare stories will undoubtedly become increasingly terrifying. Some of them may even turn out to be true. But it’s not necessary to believe the full Orwellian horror of a Mountain View search engine (or a Menlo Park social network) that knows everything about you, and acts upon that knowledge. Even in the smaller every-day injections of semantic smarts into business processes, there are things that should perhaps make us sit up and take note. Just because semantic technologies can discover patterns in customer behaviour, doesn’t mean we should necessarily act upon them too soon.

Read more

Bill Guinn, CTO Product Enablers, Amdocs Product Business Unit, delivered a keynote at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco. His talk was one of the highlights for anyone interested in how Semantic Technology can be used in enterprise systems.

“I truly believe that semantics can be a game changer in just about any B2C model.” – Bill Guinn, Amdocs

Amdocs, a company focused on innovating in the space of Customer Experience Systems, is a $3 Billion company that provides customer care, revenue management, and operational support for large telecommunications companies. To do this requires heavy duty transaction processing systems, with Amdocs processing a few billion transactions per day, resulting in petabytes of information. In his keynote, Mr. Guinn addressed how Amdocs leveraged Semantic Technology to “improve revenue, reduce cost, and improve customer satisfaction.”

The full keynote is presented in the video below. Read more

On Monday, June 20, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the seventh installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about schema.org and a review of some of the goings-on at the recent SemTech: Semantic Technology Conference. Read more

The opening keynote sessions at SemTech this week made one thing abundantly clear: Semantic technology is for business, and it’s time to start putting it in practice there.

“Semantics is a game changer in the B-to-C model,” said Bill Guinn, CTO Product Enablers, Amdocs Product Business Unit. The company’s focus is on delivering customer care and experience systems in the telco space, but Guinn’s address was centered on “applying semantics in any situation that involves complex and recurring relationships between business and consumers,” with the aim of improving revenue, reducing costs, and retaining customers.

Read more

If you missed last week’s discussion with Craig D. Hanson of Amdocs and Jans Aasman of Franz, Inc., the recorded webcast is now available and posted below.

Description

In today’s connected online world, to optimize a customer oriented business requires real time contextual customer knowledge across all business channels and relevant social and competitive forces. Read more

This webcast presents a case study from Amdocs, the market leader in customer experience systems, and Franz, Inc. a leader in Semantic Technology implementations.

LIVE WEBCAST *
Date:	Thursday, December 16, 2010
Time:	2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT
Cost:	FREE
* The webcast will be recorded and archived here at SemanticWeb.com

In today’s connected online world, to optimize a customer oriented business requires real time contextual customer knowledge across all business channels and relevant social and competitive forces. This knowledge must be used to control the intended outcome of each business transaction. In complex, heavily customer-centric businesses such as Telecommunications, Health Care, and Financial Services, the optimal business must understand how each action of the business and the individual customer relates to the profitability of the business and customer satisfaction. This is possible if systems holistically see what is going on in real time, determine the meaning of these activities, and in-stream decide and take the optimal action which maximizes profit and customer stickiness. Every business function should be coordinated and driven through a complete awareness of the business theatre. Read more