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

If you missed last week’s discussion with Craig D. Hanson of Amdocs and Jans Aasman of Franz, Inc., the recorded webcast is now available and posted below.

Description

In today’s connected online world, to optimize a customer oriented business requires real time contextual customer knowledge across all business channels and relevant social and competitive forces. Read more

This webcast presents a case study from Amdocs, the market leader in customer experience systems, and Franz, Inc. a leader in Semantic Technology implementations.

LIVE WEBCAST *
Date:	Thursday, December 16, 2010
Time:	2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT
Cost:	FREE
* The webcast will be recorded and archived here at SemanticWeb.com

In today’s connected online world, to optimize a customer oriented business requires real time contextual customer knowledge across all business channels and relevant social and competitive forces. This knowledge must be used to control the intended outcome of each business transaction. In complex, heavily customer-centric businesses such as Telecommunications, Health Care, and Financial Services, the optimal business must understand how each action of the business and the individual customer relates to the profitability of the business and customer satisfaction. This is possible if systems holistically see what is going on in real time, determine the meaning of these activities, and in-stream decide and take the optimal action which maximizes profit and customer stickiness. Every business function should be coordinated and driven through a complete awareness of the business theatre. Read more

There are still many folks out there wondering exactly how Semantic Technology can add value within mainstream solutions architectures and practices. This is something that I’ve spent the last three years working on, specifically developing a set of IT practices which leverages an underlying methodology that we’ve discussed here before called “Semantic Integration” (SI). SI can be applied to any functional or industry domain because what it really represents is the first philosophical breakthrough for enterprise integration in decades. Some people may feel that SOA represented a similar breakthrough, but in fact it hasn’t. The reason SOA has fallen short is because of continued misunderstanding as to where the application architecture began and the middleware and data architecture ended. Semantic Integration avoids this critical flaw by virtue of the fact that it supports every tier of the architecture and is relevant in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. One of the most exciting practices that we’ve built atop Semantic Integration is dedicated to improving Cyber Security through unification of the many IT security stovepipes.  

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Executive Summary

We have used a sophisticated array of AI/Machine Learning systems in combination with statistical methods, background knowledge and expert defined rules engines, to create, entirely automatically, a structured database with high quality information. The example we have produced contains structured company records and fields for over 2 million IT and telecoms companies using data taken from their websites.

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