Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Web 3.0 can change many things. How you’ve managed your business and generated revenue may be among them.

Content aggregators — as well as enterprises and even professional societies–need to start thinking more about the potential benefits that can come to them by lending their expertise to the larger linked data space, one expert says.

“Why are more companies not sharing their methods for organizing things?” asks Christine Connors, Global Director, Semantic Technology Solutions,
Dow Jones, Enterprise Media Group, who will be one of the keynote speakers at the Web. 3.0 Conference in New York next month. “I think any organization should be paid for the value they put around content — the cost of hardware, software, labor, and so on. But this same data — if I say this is what the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones define a term as — you can choose to use it or not, but if you believe we are a source of authority and trust, you should use it, and we should let you.”

Connors sees great opportunities and mutual benefits for both the provider and the consumer as great data and services are provided more widely as part of the web of linked data, with appropriate intellectual property protections and fair value remunerations in place, of course.

“There has to be a mutual benefit, like every other transaction,” she says. ” I can’t control what anyone does when they put two pieces of information together in his head — a piece of data from us and a piece of data from behind the firewall and see something, that’s fantastic. But those are the kinds of moments I want to enable.”

Enabling those moments doesn’t — and shouldn’t — include publishing every last bit of data an organization uses internally, but some of those data sets can be helpful to customers without harming the bottom line, and perhaps even strengthening it.

“What I can get in return is brand awareness,” she notes, and more — for instance, the ability to understand which parts of your ontology are of greater interest to your audience, which in an organization like Dow Jones could be used to point journalists to subjects their readers want to see tackled, or to get metrics about who is coming to find out what types of information. “That’s pretty interesting. It’s not just about we’re throwing away the value of this stuff,” she notes.

Content providers with expertise in a space, such as financials, can look to multi-level models where some information is given away for free, portions of it are sold or shared in more detail with existing customers, or higher-end quantitative analysis and modeling delivered as a fee-based service.

One problem as it relates to the data sets, however, is that organizations have been too concerned with classifying the container and not enough concerned about the data inside it. The focus has been too much on providing metadata about an object and not enough on the bigger ontology, data model, and how data links together to support analysis. The taxonomy is a commodity — the value is in the relationships among things.

“Companies need to think about the ‘aboutness’ of specific instances, about publishing very discrete bits of data that are factual and not predictive and that have a time stamp on them so they can track changes over time,” she says — that time stamp, which enables you to follow the thread of changes over time, adds a fourth component to the traditional subject/object/predicate RDF triple-store. “Then they need to put their mark on it, as it were, so that when you publish data sets on the web there are some benefits to it.”

Other areas need work too — “visualizations on data are horrendous,” she notes. And companies also need to think about globalization beyond the idea of formatting data to support tiny mobile screens but also contextualizing the socio-cultural nuances in meaning across languages. “People need to start thinking not just about access to data anywhere, but can I tweak it to be meaningful in a relative cultural context,” she says.

Connors also envisions the birth of a new business model for many of the big content providers in which they will provide a hybrid semantic web-cloud computing platform for publishing others’ content (using the provider’s schema or mapping their schema to the provider’s) that will be accessed through the provider’s interface.

“We have to move beyond the notion of being just plain content aggregators,” she notes.

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