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

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Mike Bergman recently wrote a strong defense for the Semantic Web, stating, “There have been some notable attempts of late to make elevator pitches for semantic technologies, as well as Lee Feigenbaum’s recent series on Are We Asking the Wrong Question? about semantic technologies. Some have attempted to downplay semantic Web connotations entirely and to replace the pitch with Linked Data (capitalized). These are part of a history of various ways to try to make a business case around semantic approaches.” Read more

A new provider of personalized recommendations technology, Rummble Labs recently announced the first phase of its launch. According to the release, “Rummble Labs provides a compelling solution that filters out all the “noise” and delivers only the most relevant, most accurate and most meaningful data, precisely at the moment most useful to the consumer.” Read more

Invention Machine is doing their part to ease the woes of innovation workers. According to this article “up to 80% of research time (according to market research studies) is spent doing work that is similar to, if not the same, as work that has previously been done (often in one’s own organization), while only 2% of a researcher’s time is spent performing novel research.” Read more

In a recent article about the future of semantic technology, Luca Scagliarini gives his insight into the power of semantic web technologies, particularly with regard to enterprise. Scagliarini states, “Nowhere is there greater potential for semantic technology than in the enterprise, especially as companies increasingly understand the value and impact of critical information coming from outside the organization via social media outlets.”

He continues, “This information, in the form of unstructured data – comments on blogs and discussion forums, independent reviews, posts on Twitter, Facebook, etc. – has a great ability to influence the enterprise. It represents intelligence that, when coupled with internal data, can signal significant benefits for the bottom line.” Read more

Threat Management is still a relatively new concept; there is no industry standard definition for it. In fact, the few people who are talking about it right now tend to view it from at least two very different perspectives – one a product focused approach to unifying perimeter security tools and two, a practice-focused management paradigm. As it evolves, Threat Management will eventually encompass both of those perspectives and will likely become perhaps the single most important element within any given Cyber Security solution.

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Semantic Web technologies were designed from the ground up for disparate information integration. Disparate data and its impact on data quality and consistency remain one of the most difficult challenges facing large enterprises today. Yet, there has been relatively little use of Semantic Web technologies in these organizations.

The adoption of new technology by large enterprises has always been challenging. Recently, SOA and Web service technologies have had some success in making inroads to large enterprises, mainly due to their seemingly direct addressing of business process automation problems, which business executives could readily appreciate. In contrast, the Semantic Web has been nicknamed the "Pedantic Web" due to its frequently esoteric explanations from academics, hindering its adoption.

What is required is the ability to teach business leaders the value of the technology in terms that they can understand. Our panel includes technical leaders that have taken on this challenge and have succeeded in getting these somewhat trailing edge enterprises to embrace the technology. They now wish to share that experience. Topics covered in the panel include:

• What advantages of using Semantic Technologies over existing data integration tools such as ETL and EAI that really resonated with business leaders?
• What objections to the technology has the panel experienced?
• How did the panel address these objections?
• How did members of the panel first introduce the technology?
• How did members of the panel socialize the use of ontologies without it turning into and explanation of the "Pedantic Web"?
• How did the panel address how Semantic Technologies fit in to the SOA strategies for the enterprise?

Note: This podcast is "Premium content", and requires Semantic Universe registration, which is free.

Attachment: Panel – How to Internally Market Semantic Web in Large Enterprises.MP3 (61.18 MB)

Presenters:

Matt Fisher
Progeny Systems

Matt Fisher is a Principal Systems Engineer at Progeny Systems who enjoys discussing the Semantic Web to the point that his wife hopes he gets a new hobby. 

John Gilman
Blue Shield of California

Dir. Architecture and Engineering

David Wood
Zepheira

David Wood is a partner with Zepheira and software engineer/entrepreneur specializing in disruptive technologies. He is a co-founder of the Kowari, Mulgara and PURLZ Open Source Software projects. Dr. Wood has been involved with Semantic Web research and standards efforts since 1999.

Rachel Lovinger
Razorfish

With a panel of leaders from the semantic technology industry, this session will give us the opportunity to reflect on the many discussions that have taken place during the week of SemTech 2008 and help us map the course as we prepare to extend those conversations back into our workplaces. We will touch on issues of ROI, making the case for semantic technologies in the enterprise, and what to expect in the coming year in the semantic tech space.

Note: This podcast is "Premium content", and requires Semantic Universe registration, which is free.

Attachment: Final Panel – Bringing SemTech Back to the Business.mp3 (49.7 MB)

Presenters:

Dave McComb
Semantic Arts
Dave is President of Semantic Arts, and author of “Semantics in Business Systems.” He has 30 years of experience applying leading edge technologies to enterprise level applications.

John Gilman
Blue Shield of California

Dir. Architecture and Engineering

Christine Connors

Christine joined Intuit in July 2006 as Knowledge Architect. Her goals are to design and deliver a set of systematic processes that allow the right information to be delivered at the moment of truth, thereby creating environments in which knowledge gathering is a positive experience.

Stephen Hall
Vulcan Capital

Managing Director

Jeffrey T. Pollock

James Hendler
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Assistant Dean for IT. Jim is former Director of the Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery and co-director of the Maryland Information and Network Dynamics (MIND) Laboratory at the University of Maryland, and is widely recognized as one of the earliest visionaries of the Semantic Web.

Ivan Herman
World Wide Web Consortium
See http://www.ivan-herman.net

Jonathan Mack
Guardian Life

Senior Technical Architect

Executive Summary

As social tagging grows increasingly popular on the Web, organizations are curious to see how this trendy Web 2.0 approach can benefit the business world. Social tagging allows users to employ their own language to organize and retrieve content, and encourages social collaboration between peers by making those tags visible to others. Organizations are thus looking to social tagging as a potential solution for increased findability on intranets, news/blog monitoring and collaboration in workgroups. The enterprise context is different however, and many of the elements that make social tagging work on the Web make it a challenge behind the firewall.

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