Lynda Moulton recently commented that over the last year the semantic web marketplace “has been increasingly active; new products emerge and discussion about what semantics might mean for the enterprise is constant. One thing that continues to strike me is the difficulty of explaining the meaning of, applications for, and context of semantic technologies. Those who embrace some concept of semantics are believers that search will benefit from ‘semantic technologies.’ What is less clear is how evangelists, developers, searchers and the average technology user can coalesce around the applications that will semantically enable enterprise search.” Read more

Booz&co has released a new white paper entitled Designing the Transcendent Web: The Power of Web 3.0. The report states, “Web 3.0—what we call the Transcendent Web—has four key elements: The Social Web will greatly enhance the capabilities of social networking, allowing for more powerful search, location, recommendation, and similar services. The Semantic Web will connect all the Web’s data and information much more closely, enabling contextually based search and research. The Internet of Things will let Web-connected machines of all kinds communicate with each other and with us, creating a rich flow of data about their location and status. And thanks to advances in Artificial Intelligence, all this information can be aggregated and analyzed to further refine search, recommendations, and other kinds of information filtering.” Read more

A recent article takes a fresh perspective on Google+, “one of the more interesting social concepts to come along in a long time.” The author writes, “Google+ is headed
for 20 million members by this weekend, and, depending on who you talk to, it’s either an epic success or an epic failure. But I think many of my esteemed colleagues are looking at Google+ from the wrong point of view. Everyone is writing about circles, privacy, hangouts, and whether people will switch from Facebook to Google+. But much more interesting stuff is and has been going on behind the scenes. Brands, publishers and agencies should take note and prepare to participate.” Read more

A recent article discusses many businesses resistance to semantic technology as a result of not fully understanding the risks involved. The article notes, “The use of semantic technologies for automating manual tasks, or for making previously out of reach knowledge more accessible, is (fortunately for us!) an area where companies are still making investments despite the crisis, because they understand the importance of having this strategic advantage. Still, when I suggest an automated solution to replace a manual activity (tagging, categorization, monitoring information flows) to potential customers, I am occasionally met with some resistance. Many times, the customer is not able to properly evaluate the pros and cons, and ends up opting for a very basic solution, and in doing so, loses the opportunity for tremendous cost savings and service improvements.” Read more

Maryland-based semantic technology company Revelytix will be presenting a number of their most promising products at the Semantic Technology Conference in a few weeks. One of their sessions will focus on Interactive Visualization Tools for Ontologies: “They say ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ and it is Revelytix’s belief that the lack of meaningful visual representations of ontologies makes the whole idea of using them harder for the masses to adopt. In our efforts to create a robust interactive ontology visualization tool we have met many challenges… We will demonstrate our current visualization tool and how we have dealt with these issues.” Read more

Mike Bergman recently wrote an article about how information has become undervalued and what semantic technology can do to fix the problem. Bergman writes, “Something strange began to happen with company valuations beginning twenty to thirty years ago. Book values increasingly began to diverge — go lower — from stock prices or acquisition prices. Between 1982 and 1992 the ratio of book value to market value decreased from 62% to 38% for public US companies. The why of this mystery has largely been solved, but what to do about it has not. Significantly, semantic technologies and approaches offer both a rationale and an imperative for how to get the enterprises’ books back in order. In the process, semantics may also provide a basis for more productive management and increased valuations for enterprises as well.” Read more

According to a recent article, “Salesforce.com, the cloud enterprise service, has moved even farther from its original business of contact and sales force management. In January 2011, Salesforce.com acquired the Web conferencing service provider Dimdim. Dimdim provided a free Web conferencing service. Users could share  desktops, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam… The enterprise technology of Dimdim “snaps in” the Salesforce.com cloud. In addition, the enterprise version of Dimdim supports a number of third-party cloud-based applications, including Salesforce.com competitors’ SugarCRM and Zimbra, an open source e-mail server. Dimdim also offers an open source version of its technology.” Read more

A recent article discusses the lessons that can be learned from Watson, IBM’s champion computer: “Big Blue has set its sights on many commercial applications for the technology in healthcare, financial services and customer service operations.  But the question remains, is it practical? Does Watson embody an approach that enterprises can exploit, or learn from?  How readily can a “Watson” be applied to the knowledge and content access problems of the typical enterprise?” Read more

According to a recent article, “Wal-Mart Stores paid just over $300 million in cash for Kosmix. The six-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company–which has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic–has raised $55 million from a large group of Silicon Valley venture firms… Kosmix will join the newly formed @WalmartLabs.” Read more

The upcoming Semantic Technology Conference this June in San Francisco will feature a number of case studies that highlight real-world semantic technology applications. Here are just a few (Click session titles to view details):

Dynamic Semantic Publishing at the BBC

Details on how the BBC sport site currently uses embedded Linked Data identifiers, ontologies and associated inference plus RDF semantics to improve navigation, content re-use, re-purposing, and search engine rankings.

Enabling Business Users to Define Rules and Configure the Semantic Enterprise at Amdocs

How a team of developers using semantic technology and an expressive business language made a significant breakthrough to help business users create, extend and alter high level business concepts and create natural language rules. We recently had a webcast with Craig Hanson from Amdocs, the speaker on this session. Read more