New month, and more news about semantic technologies. We can observe that this trend is gaining momentum, and it is considered fundamental when referring to Trends in Business Intelligence for 2010. Other point that shows the relevance of semantic trend, is the number of companies that are been awarded in this area, this month Exalead was Named KMWorld “100 Companies That Matter” in Knowledge Management.
This month, undoubtedly the British Government announcement about the £30 funding to create the Institute for Web Science, has been the most commented piece of news related to semantic technologies. We edited a post about this fact recently. This center will help British tech companies to develop new semantic web technologies and support their commercialization. The institute will be headed by Tim Berners-Lee and will be hosted by Oxford and Southampton universities.
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.
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.
One of the most critical aspects for a company to gain a competitive advantage is the correct management of internal knowledge. Most times, some important knowledge resides in concrete people minds and it is a key aspect for a company to share it among other people who could take advantage of it.
Technology and mainly Web 2.0 applications in the enterprise can be a good channel to share information among employees. In Telefonica, one of the tools used with this aim is the “Bank of ideas”. This is an application that allows people to introduce “Ideas” that can be useful for the rest of the organization. The ideas can be of several types: technological, organization, marketing, commercial…
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.
Of course, day after day the number of applications of semantics in the enterprise is continually growthing. This post shows a case of application of these technologies on BSS/OSS systems.
BSS/OSS systems are usually very complex systems, with lot of interfaces, lot of different users, lot of applications related… Besides this, in the last years there has been a constant competitive preusure on these systems requiring them more functions and less cost to be managed. This fact has marked a quick evolution in this kind of systems:
Software that needs to be modified each time a new requirement is requested.
Software including a configuration file holding the parameters to adjust to the different needs of each installation or context.
Software with great complexity and high parameterization capabilities. In this case the incorporation of new scenarios/processes does not need a new version of the software, but it demands a complex configuration task (e.g. for each new product there are setting with all features of sale, provisioning, billing, risk control, bundling with other products, etc.).
Software using a Knowledge Database that provides flexibility to pick up all kinds of concepts, relationships and patterns that the administrator needs to use, in a consistent and not redundant way, as seen in the next figure. This requires the introduction of a semantic layer over the relational database.
Telefónica has reached this last stage in the evolution of BSS/OSS using Semantic and Data Mining techniques in its tariff system. The tariff system is complex to configure, hence it requires very specialized people, errors are common, and they are expensive to maintain. Continue reading 'Semantics to enhance BSS/OSS'»
Together with the folks at UAM-NETS, we’ve been involved lately in an initiative to use semantic technologies for context-aware services. Which means we need to acquire, process and use context information, and we are trying to involve semantics as much as possible in those steps.
Now, the first stumbling block we found was the slippery definition of context, which seems to mean a different concept for each person working on it. And of course this is a problem if you want to create a context model based on well-defined semantic structures. In fact, there seems to be no shortage of ontologies defined for managing context, as often happens the problem is finding the right one that suits your needs, or defining yet another one from scratch. We ended up doing a mixture of both.
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.
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.
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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