Semantic Technologies in

Perspective: What Have We Learned,

and Where are We Going?

Steve Sieck

ASIDIC Spring Conference 2010

Agenda

• Some things we heard today

• Some things we didn’t hear today

• Some thoughts on the future

Where I’m coming from

The Territory

GE

NE

RA

LISTS

SPECIALISTS

Depth

Range

Source: adapted from drawing by Dave Gray (http://www.flickr.com/photos/davegray/1183652252/

Me

Questions I brought to today’s meeting

• How are the definitional relationships changing among the things we describe when we say “semantic web technologies,” “The Semantic Web,” and “smart content” changing?

• Where is the ROI on creating “smart content” occurring, and how is it being measured? And what’s next in terms of capturing and measuring business value?

• Where are semantic technologies “enabling” new offerings and business strategies, and where are they (more accurately) “enhancing” them?

• How is the explosion of social media content being incorporated in “smart content” solutions – and what additional opportunities does it present?

• How rapidly are the technologies and applications of smart content evolving? Is there anything (in practical terms) really new?

How are the (definitional) relationships changing?

“Smart Content”

“Semantic Web Technologies” “Linked Data”

“The Semantic Web”

“Semantic Content Technologies”

Where is the ROI? e.g.:

• Better discoverability (e.g., improved SEO, inbound contextual linking)

• Better product integration & customization (e.g. faceted browsing, contextual linking, workflow integration)

• More effective resource management (e.g., digital asset management, rights tracking)

• Better personalization (e.g. profiling, alerting, targeted advertising)

• Better product planning and development (content usage trends, topical coverage and gaps)

• New functionalities (e.g., creation of “instant social networks”)

• Enablement of (other) new products and/or new revenue streams

“Enhancement”/Existing or “Enablement”/New?

Products

Customers

New

NewExisting

Existing

Elsevier Illumin8IEEE?

AACR

APA

McGraw-Hill

IEEE?

IEEE?

McGraw-Hill (finer segments)

How are social media being incorporated?

Semantic content technologies and applications: What’s really new?

“Semantic indexing was an algebraic model of document retrieval. The approach used singular value decomposition of the vector space of index terms.”

– conference speaker, quoted in White and Arnold, Successful Enterprise Search Management

Technologies/ApproachesTaxonomies/Ontologies/ThesauriXML repositoriesStatistical analysisKnowledge-basedRules-basedSyntactical analysis and parsingBayesian analysisNeural networks

ApplicationsSemantic SearchFaceted BrowsingEntity and fact extractionAuto-classificationAuto-summarizationRecommendation systemsText miningData visualizationTrendingSentiment Analysis

What’s next?

• Linked Data - “an infrastructure upgrade to the back-end of Web to make it work for data”

• Adoption led by industries with dense thickets of information to manage (e.g., drug discovery, healthcare, government/security)

• Making content accessible to the network – a key role for publishers

• Demand increased by flood of real-time data (social, sensors, transactions) in science, business, professions

• Consumer (esp. mobile) applications (e.g., Siri)• New business models emerge

• Challenges:– Confusing and conflicting messaging

– Standards to address privacy and trust issues

– Standards to facilitate applications (e.g., “semantic APIs”)

– Limited supply of needed skill setsSource: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/303503677/

Semantic advertising and marketing

665 396 17

73,800

8,720

1,7900

10,000

20,000

30,000

40,000

50,000

60,000

70,000

80,000

"Semantic Advertising" "Semantic Marketing" "Semantic Branding"

March 2008

March 2010

# of Google search results

Search phrases

Source: Scott Brinker, chiefmartec.com, Google, SKS Advisors analysis

• Today:– Semantic ad networks

(e.g., Google Adsense, Peer39)

• Tomorrow:– Advertisers bid on

concepts and relationships (rather than keywords or phrases)?

– Advertisers pay to have Web content semantically delineated and fielded (RDF, etc.) for Linked Data exposure?

– Advertisers pay directory and review publishers for semantically enhanced listings?

Growth of interest in “semantic marketing” subjects (2008-2010)

Riding the Linked Data bandwagon

BBC

Best Buy

CNET

Data.gov.uk

The Guardian

New York Times

O’Reilly

Thomson Reuters

…

Good advice to publishers

• Start simply and improve functionality incrementally

• Expect greater things of your authors

• Exploit your existing in-house skills fully

• Use established standards wherever possible

• Publish raw datasets to the Web

• Release article metadata, particularly reference lists, in machine-readable form

Source: David Shotton, “Semantic Publishing: the coming revolution in scientific journal publishing”

Conclusion: Move forward with agility …and realism

Some differing bromides apply:

“Never mistake a clear view for a short distance”

“You can’t sell them the solution before they’ve bought the problem”

“Over-hyped in the short-term, under-hyped in the

long term”

The Semantic

Web

Smart content

solutions

Semantic techno-logies

Thank you!