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By Javier Carbonell, March 26, 2010 6:02 pm

Undoubtely the global economic crisis is turning the approach of public authorites to economics. There is a general consensus that new technologies and productivity should be a “must” to get a sustainable standard of life, and we can’t continue basing our development in other less value added activities. This has been clearly understood by British Government which is trying to enhance technology and mainly Information Technology. Some months ago British Government was pioneer making public data available for companies and citizens in a plausible effort to promote the initiative “Linked Data”.

Now, British Prime Minister has gone further and in the presentation “Building British Digital Future”, has bet again on Information Technologies. He has tackled this issue from different perspectives (infrastructures, services…), but it is notorious the role given to “Semantic Web”. In fact, the £30 million foundation that will be allocated to create an Institute of Web Science, headed by internet inventor Sir Tim Berners Lee and leading scientist Professor Nigel Shadbolt, was one of the main points on his speech.  He dedicated effort to describe semantic web and their implication for companies, citizens and economy. For instance he said:

“This will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the semantic web and other emerging web and internet technologies, and ensure that government is taking the right funding decisions to position the UK as a world leader. And we will invite universities and private sector web developers and companies to join this collaborative project”

Of course it is not common this kind of arguments in politicians but we are very pleased about that, and we hope other politicians/countries to follow this path.

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By Javier Carbonell, March 23, 2010 2:26 pm

Javier Carbonell (Value-it)

As we have analyzed in a previous post, Taxonomies vs Semantic Technologies to manage internal information. Somedata. Semantic Technologies and  taxonomies based on tags are very robust approaches to classify and manage internal information in a company. Now we have widen our scope of analysis and we have studied metrics of performance on how these two approaches “semantic” and “taxonomical” work when we try to merge external  and internal information.

At present, we are all conscious that companies can not be managed as silos. It is necessary to incorporate external information, to validate our information with information from other partners/competitors… All this mean that we must able to manage external and internal information, to compare it and even to mix it. In short, we must open our windows to let the external knowledge come in.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8845870@N07/2808616510

Continue reading 'Taxonomies vs Semantic Technologies to improve open innovation: Some data'»

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By Sergio Garcia, March 3, 2010 11:03 am

Author: Sergio García.   Telefónica I+D

For decades, the World Wide Web has evolved as a network of documents connected through hypertext links.  These documents have usually been conceived to be read by humans and during the last decade, the semantic web initiative emerged to develop a set of languages and tools for computers to understand the web content. Based on the Semantic  Web standards, the Linked Data initiative consists in a set of best practices to publish structured data on the Web, establishing a Web of Data.

Standards and Principles
Continue reading 'Linked data and Semantics'»

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By Javier Carbonell, January 11, 2010 1:38 pm

One of the statements I hear in all important conferences related with semantic technologies is “there will not be killer applications in the world de Semantic Technologies”. After several months analysing the semantic market I’m not so sure about that, if not killer applications, I see at least big drivers for semantic technologies. As we have included in December 2009 news summary, cloud computing and social networks will enhance semantic technologies usage, in the first case to avoid the dependence from cloud services providers, in the second to manage the information very unstructured generated by the users.

In this post I’d like to focus in other possible application for semantic technologies: their availability to improve the relevance of advertisements. The idea is to help publishers to place online advertising according the meaning of the web pages where the ads are included.

Continue reading 'Are you sure there are no killer applications for semantic technologies?'»

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By Javier Carbonell, January 8, 2010 2:14 pm

December is not usually a month rich in outstanding news related to technology, people are more interested in Christmas and companies take advantage to review their yearly performance. Nevertheless, Semantic Technologies continue occupying a relevant position among technological news and forecasts for 2010.
Health is an area where we find continuously new applications based on semantic technologies. In December, SNOMED Terminology Solutions™ (STS), a division of the College of American Pathologists (CAP) dedicated to pursue semantic interoperability for electronic health records, has collaborated in the release of the new CAP electronic Cancer Checklists (CAP eCC)—the XML version of the updated CAP Cancer Checklists.

Continue reading 'Semantic Technologies Monthly Review. December 2009'»

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By Javier Carbonell, December 18, 2009 12:55 pm

Telefónica will release its 2010 forecast for The Spanish Information Society on 21 December, at 11:00 Madrid time (GMT +1). Published by Fundación Telefónica, this annual analysis of information society data and trends has become as important reference document. The special 10th anniversary edition will provide a review of technology developments in the last decade, and a perspective on how ICT will evolve in the future.

Technologies and trends that are emerging now – such as augmented reality, interactive interfaces, convergence of devices – will become natural elements of ICT within the next 10 years, and Semantic Technologies will be important drivers of technological change. While Semantic Technology will not be a standalone feature, and users may not even know what semantic technologies are, STs will be the key to managing, and giving value to, information. According to Telefónica, implementing STs will be a necessary pre-condition for innovation, enabling high-level features for ICT in many different information-intensive fields, from business management to education to public administration. STs will be essential to support contextualisation and personalisation for end users as the flood of digital information continues to grow.
The report will be presented at Telefónica headquarters by Telefónica CEO Cesar Alierta, and on behalf of the Spanish Government by Industry Minister Miguel Sebastian.
The event will be webcast through this link
www.fundacion.telefonica.com/debateyconocimiento

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By Javier Carbonell, December 16, 2009 1:28 pm

On November the 23rd, Fundación Telefónica presented the book “Las TIC y la Justicia del Futuro” (ICT and the justice future). This book tries to give real answers to a very complex and real problem as is the justice management. In all the countries the management of justice is not a trivial problem as lot of levels and organizations are involved in its daily activity.  This drawback, is even more real in Spain because of the regional transference of part of Justice competences.

One of the intrinsic problems to solve is the interoperability issue among different justice levels.

The conscience is this need is so high that the Spanish Ministry and the Consejo General del Poder Judicial (the law highest court) have signed an agreement to settle a framework for data interoperability in justice area: the EJIS (Esquema judicial de interoperabilidad y seguridad).

Telefónica in this book, aims at Semantics at the only possible solution for that problem: “The semantic rules make possible that two organizations can understand each other, as they have defined a common vocabulary and a structure of messages for the interchange of information”.

The presentation of the book was carried out in Telefónica headquaters with the presence of the Spanish Justice Secretary.

I think that this kind of initiatives are paramount to enhance semantic technologies. Now the suppliers of technologies must do the rest.

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By Luis Polo and Diego Berrueta, December 15, 2009 10:48 am

The Semantic Web aims to build a web of linked data as an extension to the current web of documents. In order to realize this vision, real- world objects have to be described using the RDF framework, and these machine-readable descriptions are to be published on the web. The RDF framework can easily capture the relationships between resources, and also their properties, such as their names. Some of these properties are numerical, such as the number of children or the year of birth.

Real-world objects are often described by measurable properties, such as their weight, their length. Unfortunately, RDF has no built-in features in order to fully capture the semantics of such values. In plain RDF, it is possible to express that the weight of Joe is 82, i.e., a number without units. However, it is well-known in Science that a number measurement without indication of its corresponding unit of measurement is meaningless. Alternatively, it is also legal in RDF to say that the height of Joe is “1m 85cm”, i.e., a string with numbers and characters mixed together. Such strings are difficult to interpret, and even more difficult to operate with (e.g., to compare two values).

The MUO initiative was started to address these issues. During the development of the MyMobileWeb project, and particularly, as part of the design of the Delivery Context ontology, it quickly became obvious that a systematic and flexible solution was required. CTIC Foundation proposed MUO, a framework that includes an ontology, a number of URIs for most commonly used units, and a set of patterns and RDF idioms to use them. Since its initial announcement in 2008, MUO has being evolving in order to address the feedback received from the community.
An extensively re-designed version will be released soon.

Please visit the MUO homepage (http://forge.morfeo-project.org/wiki_en/index.php/Units_of_measurement_ontology
) for more information on MUO.

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By Javier Carbonell, December 14, 2009 1:22 pm

A new month, and semantic technologies continue occupying an important place in technological landscape.

• As the previous months the field of search engines is the most dynamic in the utilization of semantic technologies.  In this area Nstein Technologies Inc. www.nstein.com (TSX-V: EIN), a company specialized in digital content management solutions for information-rich enterprises has announced the release of a new product, Semantic Site Search (3S), which is based on Nstein’s patented text-mining technology to power a faceted site search which returns highly accurate results that are organized categorically. Other companies as Partsearch companies are including semantic innovations on their products. During the 2009 Enterprise Search Summit, semantic technologies, as is something habitual in this kind of events, was a hot point.
• Evolution of retrieval techniques is happening at a fast pace. This article describes this evolution
• New bet of European Union in Semantic Technologies has crystallized in a new important project coordinated  by UPM (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) to test these technologies.
• Biofarm is another sector where semantic technologies are supposed to play and important role in the future. Studies about this importance are common every month. This article stresses the value of semantic form the innovation point of view for this sector.
• Real Time Web and social networks is one of the most outstanding trends of the year, undoubtedly semantic technologies will have a  say in trying to make sense of all this stream of information : twitter, facebook… This is the aim of the Ellerdale Project.
• Journalism is another area where there are monthly news about usages of semantic technologies. In this case ThisisBristol.co.uk has become the first of Northcliffe Media’s local news sites to launch topic pages using semantic technologies.
• The application of semantic technologies to companies, seems not to have end. For instance, RealTravel.com, a travel site that helps people plan trips with advice from other travellers, announced that they will use Exalead CloudView to deliver a ’smart’ search-based application designed specifically for the travel industry.

We can no finish without referring two events in which value-it team have participated. One is the European Semantic Technology Conference 2009 (ESTC2009). This is the 3rd conference and has become a European reference about the situation of the sector.
The other event is 2009 Online Information Conference hold in London. In this conference some of the seminars were related to Semantic Technologies (value-it team offered an important contribution in them), the same happened with the stands.

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By Javier Carbonell, November 9, 2009 1:12 pm

We use to speak about the big benefits of semantic technologies for the enterprise but sometimes we explain them in a very abstract way, so it is very difficult for managers to understand where the real benefits are. For this reason I think that the best way to ”sell”  semantic technologies  is to illustrate benefits by means of an example.

This post tries to explain a real case where semantic technologies can be used:

The strategy department of a multinational company dedicated to the research in the area of Internet Services is considering to buy a start-up company specialized in the development of Social Network technologies. With this acquisition they pretend to enhance their capacity in this business area. As a previous step to the final decision- the company tries to identify all the projects dealing with this theme to calculate its turnover and to identify synergies and redundancies with the start-up to be acquired.
The company has a quality system that compels all project leaders to fill forms with relevant information about the project. This information is sent to a central database where it is stored.

 
Despite the existing information system, it is very difficult to undertake this analysis because the concept “Social Network” has a high level character with other simpler concepts hanging on it, e.g. digital identity, social communities etc… . Moreover, there is an additional barrier associated with the geographical dispersion of the several research groups, this implies different working guidelines and different terminologies to describe the same concepts. For this reason, numerous meetings and clarifications between project and strategy managers will be needed to analyze the information required.

If the company has built an ontology as described in Figure 1 which depicts the relationships between technologies and the terminology used, then systems can use this knowledge to make a much deeper processing of information, identifying useful projects and relevant information automatically.

Figura 1: Social Networks Ontology

 
If  furthermore the ontology includes other kind of relationships, such as related technologies, the Information Systems can detect which other technologies and projects can be affected by the acquisition of the start-up, as shown in Figure 2.

Figura 2 Social Networks relation with other technolologies

 
Semantic technologies represent then a new paradigm in information management, allowing the use of concepts instead of flat data structures. Some advantages of this approach are: eases a more advanced level in information processing, facilitates the communication among different user groups, improves the knowledge management and give a clearer representation of this knowledge.