Doron Aspitz of Wired reports, “Developed before the rise of Big Data, Business Intelligence, or BI, was developed to change raw data into useful information. BI worked great for a time. Then the size and complexity of available data started to grow rapidly. More data led to an increase in reports, which forced people with domain expertise to manually analyze the reports. Today, BI is widely deployed. Unfortunately, it is actually used by only a small fraction of the people in a business with access to BI systems. Forrester Research estimates ‘the fraction of total employees that use BI applications between 5 and 9%.’ People don’t like to read stacks of reports. Big Data broke BI. Can we fix things by improving the network, processing, and storage systems to make the data machines run faster? Unfortunately, we can’t.” Read more

Photo Courtesy: Flickr/Lars Plougmann

In recent blogs we’ve discussed where semantic technologies have gone in 2012, and a bit about where they will go this year (see here, here and here).

Here are some final thoughts from our panel of semantic web experts on what to expect to see as the New Year rings in:

John Breslin,lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider

Broader deployment of the schema.org terms is likely. In the study by Muehlisen and Bizer in July this year, we saw Open Graph Protocol, DC, FOAF, RSS, SIOC and Creative Commons still topping the ranks of top semantic vocabularies being used. In 2013 and beyond, I expect to see schema.org jump to the top of that list.

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

I think we will see an uptick in the job market for semantic technologists in the enterprise; primarily in the Fortune 2000. I expect to see some M&A activity as well from systems providers and integrators who recognize the desire to have a semantic component in their product suite. (No, I have no direct knowledge; it is my hunch!)

We will see increased competition from data analytics vendors who try to add RDF, OWL or graphstores to their existing platforms. I anticipate saying, at the end of 2013, that many of these immature deployments will leave some project teams disappointed. The mature vendors will need to put resources into sales and business development, with the right partners for consulting and systems integration, to be ready to respond to calls for proposals and assistance.

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Borris Evelson of the Forrester Research blog recently shared Forrester’s prediction for business intelligence advances in 2013 and beyond. Evelson writes, “BI-specific DBMSes will gain popularity. Alternative database management system (DBMS) engines architected specifically for agile BI will emerge as one of the key fundamental agile BI technologies that BI pros should closely evaluate and consider. These specialized, BI-specific DBMS databases — those that are designed specifically for BI reporting and analysis — currently have lower adoption rates when compared with their bigger, older, more versatile, jack-of-all-trades RDBMS cousins. But don’t expect these low adoption rates to continue; BI-specific DBMSes started to become mainstream in 2012 and the trend will continue in 2013. Forrester expects that more than 20% of all BI applications will be based on this technology within the next two years.” Read more

There’s no such thing as too much post-election coverage, is there? Alright, maybe there is. But we couldn’t let things die down without at least a nod to those in our space that have delivered the semantic industry’s own take on the topic.

Here are a few you may want to review:

Twitris Election Insights:

“The Twitris system had an amazing night–while Nate Silver’s model might have received well deserved attention, Twitris gave better indications and insights and large majority of the polls,” wrote Dr. Amit Sheth, Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing director and LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, in an email to us. The semantic social web application (first covered here) is a project of Kno.e.sis at Wright State University.

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At this week’s SAP Sapphire conference. NetBase will be taking its relationship with the enterprise vendor to the next level. Last December the two paired up to bring NetBase’s social intelligence (SI) to SAP BusinessObjects’ business intelligence (BI).

Coming up now is a complete integration of the NetBase technology into SAP’s Social On Demand customer relationship management (CRM) console. “Having access to social data is becoming critical to every part of the organization,” says NetBase chief marketing officer Lisa Joy Rosner. So, “social media [becomes] just one more data point” for which the enterprise must account.

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FirstRain has launched “a powerful iPad app that enables customers to quickly scan and understand critical market developments impacting their businesses with the convenience of a tablet device. FirstRain for iPad delivers precise and instantaneous intelligence on a user’s key customers, competitors and significant trends impacting their market. Delivered in a streamlined visual format, FirstRain’s release of the app continues a trend for the company of delivering highly specific, personalized, Business Web intelligence and analytics directly into the customer’s workflow of choice, including powerful Web-based applications, email, iPhone and Android devices, or right into a customer’s own intranet or social collaboration platform — and now tablets.” Read more

Digimind has released Digimind 9, “the new updated Digimind software release designed to accompany forward-thinking organizations throughout their intelligence workflows. Digimind 9 comes in response to a growing demand from companies willing to complement their CI apparatus with such features included as advanced semantic analysis, social media monitoring, and intelligence profile management. Indeed, beyond the conventional intelligence workflows, more intelligence requirements surface nowadays to leverage on social networks, unstructured data, and related analysis.” Read more

At the SemTech San Francisco 2011 conference, Chris Testa of Adly spoke about a platform they used internally for Business Intelligenge analytics. There was great interest from the audience, and this week, Adly announced the release of “Blingalytics” as free, open-source software. While not explicitly semantic itself, Blingalytics works WITH Adly’s semantic system, serving as the underlying billing and business intelligence infrastructure they use to manage the business. I caught up with the Adly team (Arnie Gullov-Singh, CEO; Chris Testa, Director, Engineering; and Krista Thomas, VP Marketing) to hear more about the platform.

Q: So what is Blingalytics?

A: Simply put, Blingalytics is the first and only open source business intelligence platform in Python.  The Blingalytics Python package makes it easy to slice and dice your business KPIs, no matter what data you’re looking at: retweets, click-through rates, net revenue, etc.

Blingalytics takes care of the gritty details of optimally crunching the numbers, so that you can jump straight to defining your view into your business stats and performance analytics.

Blingalytics was built by Chris Testa and Jeff Schenck

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On the way from Saplo – that’s the company whose tradeshow trademark is the wearing of shocking green suits by CEO Mattias Tyrberg and his co-founders – is a Prediction API for its text analytics platform. The vendor already provides through its API access to services for entity and topic tagging, related and similar articles, sentiment analysis and contextual recognition upon which developers can build applications.

The Prediction API, due around summer’s end, seeks to predict outcomes from text, as Tyrberg describes it. That is, it assesses how a company name or any other word has been described in text and  finds a correlation between that and expected outcomes, such as sales volumes.

It works by having the user submit historic text and historic data points, from which the technology analyzes the relationship between the meaning of the text and the data that the user wants to have predicted (it also will return data of how good it believes it can predict the outcome, Tyrberg says). After that, the user submits new text data to Saplo for a new time period, and based on that text Saplo returns a prediction of the next outcome.

“Think of it like BI,” says Tyrberg. “You might be able to predict new numbers based on previous numbers, but a lot of information that is available is in written text, and we can find the correlations between the meaning of that text and numerical data.”

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Cambridge Semantics says it’s aiming at moving organizations from business intelligence to operational intelligence. “The data is real and you can bring in new data in minutes. And business users can create and change reports and ask ‘what if’ questions themselves,” explained EVP Steven Kludt at the SemTech conference. “We can be event based—if something changes in the data we can respond to that with rules around the data, like kick off a workflow. We can accommodate on the spot so that the business is constantly tuning things right away.” (Video after the jump)

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