A new report from the Institute for Global Futures, Global Futures Forecast 2012, lays out the top trends that it believes will shape the coming year. It’s looking ahead to a future that it says may be characterized by complex trends, accelerated change, hyper-competition, disruption, innovation and uncertainty, and that will demand a new way of operating.

It recommends continuing investment in innovation in the U.S., as that is the central driver of US and global competitive advantage, and a requirement for achieving more stable growth. And it advises that organizations’ leaders need to do a better job becoming long-range thinkers given that the accelerated pace of change means that the future is coming at us faster than ever before, and with change comes risk.

What do such things have to do with the Semantic Web and semantic technologies? Apparently, quite a lot.

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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 !

Today the Pew Center released a survey regarding the future of the Semantic Web. More than half of those responded didn’t think that the vision associated with the Semantic Web would be realized – that’s a startling conclusion, really. It’s even more remarkable given the fact that those who responded negatively didn’t think it would even happen by 2020.

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In our last post on Intelligent Healthcare, we talked a bit about Electronic Healthcare Record systems. EHR/EMR technology is an important piece of the larger set of clinical systems as it represents a patient centric organizational framework. However; EHRs are only part of a larger picture. One area that is particularly promising for the application of Semantic technology to healthcare is process management. When we discuss process management in this context, we’re not talking about traditional process management software solutions. Healthcare process management is in a sense a formalization of (medical) practice approaches that for the most part aren’t automated and in many cases likely never can be fully automated.

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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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Much if not all of the discussion over the past two years in regards to Healthcare Modernization has revolved around the deployment of Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems. Monies were budgeted to EHR adoption in last year’s Stimulus package and more monies will be allocated towards EHR adoption as a result of the recent Healthcare Reform package. So what does this all mean in regards to Intelligent Healthcare and the application of Semantic technology? First we’ll need to take a closer look at EHRs.

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In part 1 of the Cyber Security and Semantics series we discussed some of the highlights of how or where semantics may help transform the practice of Cyber Security. To understand the full implications of why Semantics and Semantic Technology is so crucial for Cyber Security we need to examine more of the problem space associated with.

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Some of you here already know it – many others are still asking it though – “What is the Big Deal with Semantic Technology, we don’t get it.”

Fair Enough. If we had to pick one thing that crystallizes the importance of what we’re doing and link it a problem that just about everyone in IT faces today chances are we could change industry perceptions and make some real progress.

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Over the past twenty years, a number of standards groups have arisen to develop, manage or reconcile Healthcare data or IT-related standards. Much of the focus over the past decade has been dedicated specifically to data exchange standards and identifying standard data elements for various sub-domains of Healthcare practice automation. The primary standards bodies involved in these activities include but are not limited to the following organizations:

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I decided to conduct an informal survey in an attempt to gauge the current level of adoption and growth potential for Semantic Technology as an industry vertical. The results indicate to me that while progress is being made we still need to do a better job of delivering the message – this messaging problem is the number one reason why adoption of Semantic Technologies and Semantic Methodologies is proceeding slower than we had anticipated. 

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Of all the areas where Semantic Technology may help to transform current practices, no one area may be impacted more than Science.

I’ll distinguish empirical science from the myriad of other sciences by stating that it is characterized more by processes designed to facilitate discovery – the scientific method. The goal of empirical science is to solve problems, it does so through answering a series of questions, often through use of experimentation. Of the IT domains I’ve discussed previously the one that is most involved in pure science is Healthcare, so let’s take a look at that for moment.

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