Best Buy has now released its previously announced “Like for Like” Metis API: “BBY Open and the Metis project team are excited to announce the release of our semantically-driven ‘Like for Like’ endpoint, available now for public consumption. Like for like functionality is defined as: “for any given game, software, or hardgood SKU, display the products most like it, ordered by the number of product attributes that match’.” continued…

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Photo credit: FlickR/crd!

With Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Small Business Saturday behind us, and Cyber-Monday right in front of us, it is clear the holiday season is in full force. Apparently, retailers – both online and real-world – are doing pretty well as a group when it comes to sales racked up.

Reports have it that e-commerce topped the $1 billion mark for Black Friday in the U.S. for the first time this year, with Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple taking honors as the most visited online stores, according to ComScore. Consumers spent $11.2 billion at stores across the U.S. on Black Friday, said ShopperTrak, down from last year but probably impacted by more people heading out to more stores for deals that began on Thursday night. The National Retail Federation put total spending over the four-day weekend at a record $59.1 billion, up 13 percent from $52.4 billion last year.

Not surprisingly, semantic technology wants in on the shopping action. Social intelligence vendor NetBase, for instance, just launched a new online tool that analyzes the web for mentions of the 10 top retailers to show the mood of shoppers flocking to those sources. The Mood Meter, which media outlets and others can embed in their sites, ranks the 10 brands based on sentiment unearthed with the help of its natural language processing technology.  continued…

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Traditional retailers like Best Buy are looking for opportunities to survive and grow, as competition increases and margins grow ever-narrower. Semantic Web and Linked Data solutions are part enabling transformation, even inside traditional offline retailers. continued…

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Best Buy, as readers of this blog know, has been diving deep into the semantic web waters under Myers’ direction for a few years now, and he shared that journey with the audience at SemTech.

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Infolinks already delivers in-text advertising campaigns across 250 billion pages of content in its network of pre-screened web sites that it says reach over 350 million unique visitors. The company says that network consists of more than 50,000 online publishers and blogging sites.

Its full page textual analysis “relies on natural language processing, machine learning and other proprietary linguistics technologies to ensure that ads are contextually relevant to the publisher’s content and what visitors are reading at any time,” says chief marketing officer Tomer Treves, as well as to avoid inappropriate brand associations.

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Jay Myers, lead web development engineer at Best Buy, acknowledged that he had to make some last-minute alterations to the presentation he gave yesterday at SemTech on the practical business uses of RDFa for search engines and beyond. They were required in light of the schema.org announcement that came at the end of last week. Myers worked the new standard for creating and supporting a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages in microdata into a slide that showed how the Semantic Web can bring equilibrium to the pendulum that tends to swing between the shiny-ball stuff of the web that’s tailored for human consumption and the back-end keyword- and metadata-stuffing that’s done for the benefits of machine-reading.

But RDFa still takes top billing.

schema.org, Myers told the audience, is “search-centric and what I believe what the Semantic Web really entails is knowledge and insight,” he said.

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Well, in just the last week he’s been stoking the semantic data foundation – pushing Best Buy’s product visibility and discovery further along with the help of RDFa and pulling in some semantic data too, all geared to building up what he calls the company’s Insight Engine. And there’s more coming soon, as Myers’ has a personal agenda of stretching RDFa just about as far as he can in Best Buy product pages. “My goal is to make our web site as data- rich as possible while preserving the front-end user experience we have now,” he says. “It’s totally possible and I think we achieved that so far.”

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According to Myers, “The basic aim of the browse widening project is, well, to make the site wider (groundbreaking, I know). Because this activity (in theory) should take a dev about 5 minutes to accomplish, we have decided to stick a couple of extra nuggets into the “requirements” of the project. As part of my ongoing passion to turn bestbuy.com into the most data-rich website on the planet, I am augmenting the site’s HTML with RDFa and vocabularies like GoodRelations, vCard, and Google’s review vocab, integrating rich product and store data directly into the front-end user experience to maximize the machine extractability and readability while preserving the visual user experience as it stands today.” continued…

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Best Buy may be considered by many as a poster child for why businesses should use Semantic Web technologies. An early adopter of the GoodRelations vocabulary (just recommended for product and price information usage in web pages by Google), the retailer has been at the forefront of the Semantic Web wave – but it’s only just begun.

Semantic Web technologies, says Jay Myers, lead web development engineer at Best Buy, are a portal to better insight, in more ways than one (thoughts he’ll be sharing in more detail with attendees at this week’s Semantic Web Summit in Boston).  “There is a vast amount of data that corporations produce or are able to consume,” he says – and within that a huge amount of insight most of them aren’t tapping into, which is a real loss considering the challenging environment that businesses such as retailers confront.

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DESCRIPTION: If own or manage a web site that contains information about products or services, you can add a relatively small amount of markup to existing HTML, and have semantic information that both Google and other semantic applications will be able to process. Many Web search engines, smart phone apps, and even cutting-edge applications like augmented reality search for and use this type of markup.

Adding semantic markup provides an improved display of the information in Google search results, providing an inherent SEO benefit. This is the same technology being successfully used by BestBuy, Overstock.com, and many others. continued…

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This article kicks off a series of interviews on Semantic Technologies in the MIT Entrepreneurship Review with industry thought leaders including Thomas Tague (Thomson Reuters), Chris Messina (Google), David Recordon (Facebook), Will Hunsinger (Evri) and Jamie Taylor (Metaweb).

At first sight, the answer is yes. I recently attended the Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco. What had begun in 2005 as a 300-person conference has grown into a 5-day event with an amazing depth both of workshops and panels and over 1,300 participants this year. The conference is organized by Semantic Universe, an online platform with the goal of “educating the world about semantic technologies and applications”.

I have had the opportunity to talk to some of the key actors and innovators that have pushed semantic technologies and linked data forward over the past years since the term “Semantic Web” was first coined by Sir Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The term takes on different meanings in different contexts: to some it is about representation of information in certain well-defined formats to make it machine-readable and easy to interpret; to others it is about web services and the aggregation of information to create valuable applications for users, while still others would highlight the artificial intelligence aspect and its use in tackling complex problems.

I have been personally drawn to the field of semantic technologies for some time, realizing the impact that these technologies will have on the way we consume information online as well as on the possibilities from an enterprise perspective. One thing I realized at the conference was that a lot of things that we take granted today, like online recommendations, are already powered by semantic technologies. In fact, a lot of the conversations happening in the hallways, between sessions, were not just around technical topics like how to best construct OWL ontologies or how to structure SPARQL queries, but rather about business issues like designing the right monetization models, improving e-commerce with semantic technologies, gauging the potential business impact of Facebook’s Open Graph, Twitter annotations or Google’s rich snippets. The New York Times, BBC, Newsweek, Tesco, Best Buy are some examples of companies that have been building and are relying on semantic technologies. To me, these are all strong indicators that semantic technologies have reached the tipping point.

Jamie Taylor, Minister of Information at Metaweb, the company behind Freebase, sees clear indications that semantic technologies have become more mainstream:  “Just the sheer size of the conference has increased pretty dramatically, as well as the diversity of people who actually have commercial offerings in terms of tools that matter to your typical webmaster, your typical content manager.” While there is still a strong academic track to semantic technologies, Taylor says, “it’s very interesting that sometimes semantic technologies have met the Web 2.0 lightweight user contribution-type model and as you add semantics into these types of systems – fairly lightweight semantics – all of a sudden they start getting much greater benefit.”

Managing one of the best-known semantic technology start-ups, Will Hunsinger, CEO of Evri, tells me that he has “seen a lot more activity in the last 12 month”. Naming Microsoft’s acquisition of Powerset and Apple’s acquisition of Siri as examples, he also points out that these “transactions have given validation that the technology is here and ready, but also that there is a path to liquidity.” One advice for startups and companies in the semantic technologies sector is to focus less on the technology itself and spend more time understanding consumers’ needs by asking themselves: “What does this technology do better than what’s out there such that you are going to solve a real problem”.  For example, at Evri, he adds “we create a better experience for the consumer applying the technology where it actually has a distinct advantage over keyword e.g. delivering precise results around general topics like “movies” or “reality tv”, understanding meaning and context (e.g. why is a particular entity popular right now) or even enabling consumers to follow topics over time”.

From a technological perspective, the recent developments around RDFa, a simpler version of RDF which allows users to add metadata to their content, will further accelerate the growth of the Semantic Web. Drupal 7, one of the biggest open source content management systems used on hundreds of thousands of websites, comes with major RDFa functionality. The latest HTML5 draft has RDFa support in it. Facebook’s Open Graph protocol is based on RDFa. Google Rich Snippets support RDFa. According to a recent GigaOM report, Twitter Annotations are looking to use it.

The benefits of semantic technologies with respect to making online search better are most obvious and to some extent already observable today. David Recordon, Senior Open Programs Manager at Facebook, sees some powerful applications in search, essentially “giving you a filter into the world based on your friends”. Thanks to semantic technologies built into the Facebook platform “developers [can] build on top of information which people have trusted Facebook with, whether that’s status updates or things they like, people they are connected to […]”. Google’s Open Web Advocate, Chris Messina, told me he agrees that social search will play a key role in the future: “we are starting to see Google integrating Twitter streams in search experience, hopefully providing users with more actionable information, providing a number of different opinions, more contextual data. It is certainly something Google is paying a lot of attention to – information that is contextual to the user, not just generic to the world.”

But what about exploiting the power of the semantic web by pulling in data from different sources, the premise of linked data? Thomas Tague, VP Platform Strategy at Thomson Reuters and in charge of the OpenCalais project, a free service to analyze and extract concepts from user-submitted texts or web sources, told me about the exciting opportunities he sees at the intersection of highly trusted monetized content and free web content. He says that “people are not going to make $100 million bets based on blog postings. But that blog posting may be an outlier, may be an initial indicator, maybe about a layoff at a factory or something like that, that the user can now immediately link back to Thomson Reuters data and gain insight and take action.” While Tague certainly shares the enthusiasm for the growth of semantic technologies and adoption of standards by industry participants, utilization of linked data remains low in his view. Therefore, his short-term outlook with respect to utilization of the linked data cloud, remains rather cautious: “There is a lot of talk about it, but with respect to our linked-data company information, people aren’t picking it up yet very much.”

So what can we expect in the near future? Jamie Taylor tells me that he thinks “the idea that you can aggregate is something very novel: all of a sudden my data is not limited to my data silo.” He distinguishes two types of data: core data, which must be managed by the organization to drive the core business, and context data–such as geo data. He believes that what “semantic technologies allow is in some sense to outsource [context data] to the community for maintenance.”

Overall, there seems to be consensus that as semantic technologies move out of the purely technical corner and beyond the innovators and early adopters in academia and government, content-heavy organizations and users like publishers or e-commerce sites will help these technologies cross the chasm as they see the largest benefit in applying the technology. As pointed out earlier, companies like The New York Times or Best Buy have already begun to build and rely on semantic technologies. As more and more companies start adopting linked data standards and share data in the linked data cloud, we will see more businesses created to derive value from aggregating data across different datasets to provide value to their users.

If this article has sparked your interest into semantic technologies, I can recommend a documentary by Kate Ray, a recent graduate from NYU with a major in Journalism/Psychology, who has contributed to the demystification of the Semantic Web through interviews with thought leaders, including Tim Berners-Lee, Clay Shirky, Chris Dixon, David Weinberger, Nova Spivack, Jason Shellen, Lee Feigenbaum, John Hebeler, Alon Halevy, David Karger and Abraham Bernstein. The clip has been viewed by more than 120,000 people so far. I asked Kate what motivated her to do the documentary: “My dad has been doing semantic web stuff for years, and my entire family never really knew what he was doing, so partly I was trying to make something that all these people here could show to their friends and family. I also had an academic interest in it.” Kate is now working on a company called Kommons, which she describes as a “Q&A forum built on top of Twitter; to let people ask questions to public figures – or anyone – and backing questions you agree with”.

MIT is at the forefront of exploring applications to commercialize linked data and semantic technologies, adding a new seminar, Linked Data Ventures, to the fall curriculum. The class will be taught by an all-star team consisting of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Dr. Lalana Kagal, K. Krasnow Waterman, as well as Reed Sturtevant and Katie Rae. Computer science and business students will work in small teams to develop prototypes based on Semantic Web technologies.

About The Author

Rene Reinsberg is currently a member of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation program at MIT. His interests span Linked Data, Big Data, Open Data, and social graph analytics.

http://miter.mit.edu/article/have-semantic-technologies-crossed-chasm-yet

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