Bob DuCharme: "People learn that data is more valuable than applications or hardware."
22.08.2007
From June 17 - 18, 2008 international experts will gather at the Linked Data Planet conference in New York to discuss latest trends and future prospects in the commercialization of the semantic web. Tassilo Pellegrini talked to conference chair Bob DuCharme about the status quo of Semantic Web in the US and the many facettes of one of the most promising developments for the next generation internet.
Semantic Web gets lot of attention from the US media both from advocates and critics. Is the technology ready for the masses?
As with many other Internet-related technologies, semantic web standards and software can add a lot of features to applications used by large audiences, although those audiences won't necessarily know what's behind the applications they're using. For example, people who use bambora.com to share travel experiences and find recommendations about airlines, food and places to stay don't know that the site uses an ontology to help them find other users with similar tastes and interests. Bambora's Taylor Cowan will discuss this in the conference's "Semantic Web and Your Users" track, which will have many other presentations on how semantic web applications can interact with users. Keynote speaker Nova Spivack is also a firm believer in connecting this technology to end users, as he described in his Semantic Web School interview .
One of the hot topics is Corporate Semantic Web. Start-Ups blossom and acquire impressive funding from venture capital. What are the hopes and expected returns that drive investments in this area?
One interesting aspect of the idea of "corporate semantic webs" is the distinction between "The" Semantic Web—that is, the layer of semantics added to the worldwide web, available to everyone—and the application of semantic web technology to internal data within an organization. Quick wins are often easier with the latter, because people have more control over that data and and a better understanding of its role in their business. Another interesting area is applications that combine the use of internal data and publicly available data.
I think the return on investment that these venture capitalists foresee is that W3C standards such as RDF and OWL make it easier to add metadata to a collection of data, which lets you get more value out of that data by making it easier to find patterns, connections, and new ways to use that data. People learned several years ago that data is more valuable than applications or hardware, so something that can add more value to their existing data can help them find new ways to put that data to work for their organization, leading to a greater potential for cost savings and profits.
Government, health care and life sciences are early adopters in the US. In the search market Yahoo and Google just recently announced that it is watching the development carefully. Do you dare to give any predictions about the future roll out?
Google has made a business of doing massive full-text indexing and then doing interesting things with the indexes. They don't impose much structure on the text they index, and have never seemed very interested in the kind of XML-related technologies that the Semantic Web often builds on. Yahoo has shown a strong commitment to the potential of Semantic Web technology with the simple act of hiring Dave Beckett, one of the original leading names in the area. He recently wrote in his weblog that "It's been nearly 2 years since [he] joined Yahoo! and the the semantic web-based technology [he] helped develop has been deployed in production for some time." As with sites such as bambora.com, though, the use of this technology is usually hidden away where end users can't see it.
For now, I think that financial information is a good potential growth area for semantic web standards and tools, but I'll probably have a better answer after the conference, because that's one of the goals of the conference—to get a better idea of where the new growth areas are.
Beside the Semantic Web Strategies events like the Semantic Technologies Conference call for attention. But what is the difference between these two events?
The names of the two conferences reveal their different focus: one is mostly about technology, while the October one focuses on strategies for using the technology. The Semantic Web Strategies conference will bring business people and technology people together to talk about ways to connect semantic web technologies and business needs. There's no magic wand to make this connection happen all at once, so the development of plans to make those connections will be an important theme; I'm especially looking forward to the Monday afternoon panel discussion (which includes the Semantic Web Schools' Andreas Blumauer) titled "Developing a Semantic Web Strategy for your Organization".
About Bob DuCharme
Semantic Web Strategies conference chair Bob DuCharme is a Solutions Architect at Innodata Isogen. In a recent XML.com newsletter, editor Kendall Clark wrote "Does anyone write tech prose as clear as Bob?" Bob is the author of Manning Publications' "XSLT Quickly," Prentice Hall's "XML: The Annotated Specification" and "SGML CD," and McGraw Hill's "Operating Systems Handbook." He's written over seventy pieces for XML.com and has contributed to Dr. Dobb's Journal, perl.com, XML Magazine, XML Journal, IBM developerWorks, XML Developer, O'Reilly Books' "XML Hacks," and Prentice Hall's "XML Handbook." Bob received his BA in Religion from Columbia University and his Masters in Computer Science from New York University. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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