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By Javier Carbonell, June 24, 2010 3:13 pm

Undoubtedly the final value-it roadmap of STE is one of the most relevant project outputs. We can find analysis about STE from the point of the demand, and from the point of view of the offer, but not about how to connect offer and demand. This document tries to bridge this important gap and try to near this two worlds.

The document includes an in-depth study of STE taxonomy from the point of view of demand, factors that condition the market of STE,  a mapping for several vertical sectors about where Semantic Technologies can be more feasible to be used, an analysis of STE suppliers that can offer solutions taking into account the prior taxonomy, figures about the potential STE market…

For more information please, stay tuned.

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By Javier Carbonell,

A new document with a nice collection of Use Cases elaborated by value-it team will be published soon. This document will be a relevant collection of use cases related to application of semantic technologies.

It will include real examples, and other that are not mature yet.  All of them will be segmented by vertical sector and by area of application. They are based on real applications of partners, value-it analysis, and value-it interviews.

Please stay tuned because document will be accessible for all and free, soon.

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By Javier Carbonell, May 4, 2010 12:23 pm

A new month and a new post about Semantic Technologies news. The most outstanding fact during this period has been the acquisition of Siri by Apple. As you all know, Siri is a Personal Virtual Assistant that had raised lot of buzz during this last year, mainly after its presentation in SemTech 2009. Now Apple has done a bet on its technology to improve the iPhone usability, including intelligence reasoning and the excellent voice recognition capabilities from Siri. In some months we will see the reach of this movement.

Social media trend continues as the great opportunity for Semantic providers, this has been the case of Attensity that has acquired social media monitoring solution provider Biz360 to offer new solutions in this field. Other company, Glue,  a social browsing assistant that shows ratings and recommendations of movies, books, restaurants, stocks, and other things as you surf the Web (via a browser plug-in), has launched  new personalization features that use your past “likes” in facebook to help you pick your next favorite movie, album or book.

Related to media companies, the Chicago Tribune Media Group announced a partnership with LOUD3R, a real-time content discovery publishing platform, to power its Chicago-area blog network.

SemTech 2010 is getting closer and we begin to know more about what themes will be “hot” in this edition, for example “Marketing and advertising on the semantic web”  or XBRL

Other area where semantic is playing an important role is that of advertising, Peer 39 is the company best positioned in this field, though others are working on it, for instance the start up Kehalim .

Research field is another field where semantics are very feasible to be used, it is very common to hear about developments in this area. This month North Carolina Research Community has given this step selecting Collexis Holdings, Inc., a leading developer of semantic technology and knowledge discovery software, to link its community of 5.000 researchers.  Nasa has announced too, an incursion in the semantic search realm with an internal solution that enables employees to search more than 50 years of information related to its manned space-flight program. Other relevant announcement is the commercial version of the semantic software solution Intellexer Categorizer 1.2 from EffectiveSoft for document sorting and categorization.

The analysis carried out by Richard MacManus and published in Readwriteweb about the performance of linked data called “Modigliani test” is a “must read”. The conclusion is that: “there is still a lot of work to be done, because we cannot expect wide usage and interest in the Semantic Web if writing such a query takes more than an hour and a lot of technical knowledge”. It is very interesting too this analysis about the role of metadata in integration.

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By Javier Carbonell, April 22, 2010 2:18 pm

Value-it preliminary results

Value-it analysis about semantic technologies detects a big need of IT applications more intelligent in companies in order to take advantage of new IT trends as Web 2.0 or Cloud Computing. This need of “smarter” applications sometimes is not seen by companies as a stake on Semantic Technologies. The cause of this, is that Semantics are usually not sold by they own, but they are included in other applications more traditional, so the user company sometimes don’t know that the improvement in efficiency and new marvelous features have a semantic technologies hide the depth.

The next figue shows how most companies have implemented and considered very important some functions and applications (mainly interoperability, and ability to search and link information) very related with intelligence

Source: Value-it

Nevertheless, when we ask those people if they are thinking of technologies related with semantic technologies, most of them answer “NO”. (here we have included NLP, because though is not a semantic technology, sometimes it has a strong relation) and only in the ITC sector the affirmative answers reach the 25%

Source: Value-it

For this reason I think that there is still an activity to do related with the dissemination and promotion of Semantic Technologies, mainly amongst the IT technicians, that are finally who are going to buy these technologies.

For more information you can visit value-it site

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By Javier Carbonell,

Value-it preliminary results

We have stated in a previous post that Semantic technologies will have a say in the next years in the IT  world, and the market will be tempting for lot of companies.

Aggregated numbers are useful, but sometimes it could be interesting for suppliers a breakdown in vertical sectors in order to help them to direct efforts.

Value-it project has used a segmentation of the market by vertical sectors in its analysis, so it can offer a forecast using this variable.

According to this analysis, as it is shown in figure, the market will be very distributed among all sectors and not concentrated in one or two.

Source: Provisional estimate of product market potential. OVUM. Datamonitor

According to these data, manufacturing will be the most outstanding area for semantics, as manufacturing is a big, diverse and complex sector, that includes establishments engaged in the mechanical, physical and chemical transformation of materials, substances, or components into new products. For that reason is a sector with lots of necessities, the three most important in which semantics can help for people interviewed and that can act as drivers are “Conceptual applications”, “Knowledge Sharing”, and “Data and process Integration”. About the areas more suitable for semantics, in this sector “Product lifecycle” is much more important than in any other, because of the complexity involved in managing so wide range of products.

For more information about semantic technologies forecasts in this sector or others you can visit value-it site

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By Javier Carbonell,

Value-it preliminary results

In this and the few next posts we are going to  show data obtained in Value-it project. These results have been got from a market research that includes 50 in-depth interviews and a poll carried out at the end of 2009 to 625 directors, managers and people involved in the process of IT decision making. The analysis covers different vertical sectors and different countries in Europe.

In general, it has been detected a big necessity of IT applications more intelligent in order to face the new challenges to come: cloud computing, social networks…

Nevertheless, semantic technologies are not expected to be commercialized in a standalone way. They will be bundled enriching traditional applications giving them a kind of intelligence. For this reason a killer application is not waited, nor an exponential increase of Semantic Technologies market in Europe.

As showed in the next figure, a continuos increment it is expected for the next 5 years, surpassing the 700 Millions of euros in the year 2014 in Europe.

Source: Provisional estimate of product market potential. OVUM. Datamonitor

About the functions more feasible to adopt these technologies, CRM and Enterprise Management are the main two areas enhancing Semantic Technologies market. On the other side, Supply Chain Management and process integration will play a residual role in all this evolution.

Source: Provisional estimate of product market potential. OVUM. Datamonitor

Though this data are not as spectacular are others showed in IT market (cloud computing…) what it is clear is that there is an important market that IT companies should consider.

For more information you can visit value-it site

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By Javier Carbonell, March 23, 2010 12:25 am

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…

Continue reading 'Taxonomies vs Semantic Technologies to manage internal information: Some data'»

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By Javier Carbonell, January 21, 2010 3:46 pm

Of course, the main important point when you try to sell something is the existence of “Demand“. It doesn’t matter we are speaking about a product, a service, or why not, a technology.

For this reason I think that “Demand driven report” is a fundamental document for those who are interested in semantic technologies. Lots of posts and articles have been written about Semantic Technologies but not too much of them are centered in the main question for any business: Who is going to be interested on these technologies?. In this document Value-it team has been working hard on analyzing different sectors, diving in each one to pinpoint in which areas the Semantic Technologies could fit.

Continue reading 'Value-it. First deliverables main results. Demand Driven Report'»

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By Javier Carbonell, January 18, 2010 6:39 pm

One of the most relevant results of  Technovision report is the identification of blockers to move semantics from laboratory to market.  We all know that the introduction of new technology trends is usually a difficult task.

Although there is a big consensus about the acceptable maturity level of STE, it is not easy to measure beforehand the resistance and difficulties to implement solutions as the STE. Some barriers such as legacy systems, inertia, and staff habits ought to be overcome in order to achieve successful implementations.

Continue reading 'Value-it. First deliverables main results. Technovision Report (Market and Technology blockers)'»

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By Javier Carbonell,

Among the data that this document edited by Value-it team includes I would like to highlight the data about pilot implementations.

The main conclusions are:

• USA is in front of the classification
• Still public sector is the “big client”, if we add up defense, public sector and healthcare, the results account for almost of half of the pilot (46%)

Continue reading 'Value-it. First deliverables main results. Technovision Report (Pilots data)'»