The Semantic Web Blog earlier this month covered the news that Ontology Systems is updating its Ontology semantic search platform to Version 4.0, which was previewed last week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Following that, we had an opportunity to catch up with CTO and co-founder Leo Zancani to learn more about the upcoming version of the platform that features new search capabilities under the Project Rothko code name banner, as well as the just-released Version 3.7, and how the telco and financial sectors its technology is focused on can leverage it.

The company’s Ontology platform connects its Ontology Intelligence 360 and Ontology Integrity Manager solutions. The former builds dependency models of business entities by looking at data in existing enterprise systems, and the latter is a data integrity solution that measures and monitors in an ongoing way the data alignment among various different systems that talk about the same thing. Those two products, Zancani explains, “depend on quite finely modeled data, so there are quite strict semantic models inside them. Data that is taken from existing systems populates those strict models, and customers are interested in then using the data in those models to drive business processes,” he says. Due in Version 4.0 that should debut in April, “Rothko adds the capability on the side that says, that’s great, but there also is value in the data you don’t want to or need to or can’t afford to model right now, and you can access that with a much more direct search capability.”

What’s the call for this two-tiered search approach in the verticals Ontology Systems is focused on? Take the telco sector, where the company founders have a long history. The industry, says Zancani, is in crisis now, as vendors like Apple and Google eat its lunch, and as the fallout from major consolidation among telco players makes traditional data integration economically untenable.

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Bill Guinn, CTO Product Enablers, Amdocs Product Business Unit, delivered a keynote at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco. His talk was one of the highlights for anyone interested in how Semantic Technology can be used in enterprise systems.

“I truly believe that semantics can be a game changer in just about any B2C model.” – Bill Guinn, Amdocs

Amdocs, a company focused on innovating in the space of Customer Experience Systems, is a $3 Billion company that provides customer care, revenue management, and operational support for large telecommunications companies. To do this requires heavy duty transaction processing systems, with Amdocs processing a few billion transactions per day, resulting in petabytes of information. In his keynote, Mr. Guinn addressed how Amdocs leveraged Semantic Technology to “improve revenue, reduce cost, and improve customer satisfaction.”

The full keynote is presented in the video below. Read more