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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,

During June month news and movements related to semantic technologies have continued gaining pace, perhaps as a prelude of a successful SemTech conference (we will not include SemTech news in this post as it has just started) .
Advertisement is getting momentum as an area where Semantic Technologies have an important say. During this month Crystal has announced that will be focused on licensing its Semantic Advertising Technology  and Admeld And Peer39 formed an alliance.

Editorial industry is relying on semantic technologies to manage information, too. Thus, Elsvier has adquired semantic technology provider Collexis Holdings, and  in  the field of 2.0 applications, Huffington Post bought Adaptive Semantics to keep up with 100,000 comments a day
As technological innovation, it must be highlighted the launching of  AllegroGraph 4.0, the first Native RDF database in the industry by Franz
Other relevant announcements have been: Experts System adopts COGITO(R) Monitor Platform to Semantically Search and Analyze Online Sentiment, the startup Primal that is taking the approach of trying  to understand the actual meaning of a user’s commands  to create a webpage that contains the exact information he is looking for, TechAmerica will try  Monster’s Semantic 6Sense Search Technology in its hiring process. or that Yummly Launches World’s First Semantic Search Platform for Food and Recipes

Very fascinating is the initiative from Expert System to create a semantic valley consortium in Italy to promote Semantic Technologies. Some time will be required to know if this proposal will be followed by others
The interest and trust in Semantic Technologies can be seen in the fact that startups focused on these technologies are getting funding, for instance Inform Technologies (dedicated to semantic search) has risen 4$ million from VC, and wordster (that tries to provide the correct meaning of a word based on the context) one million.

There are some curious news as an article claiming that  Semantic Technologies could have prevented the BP oil disaster. And some good articles of dissemination and analysis of Semantic Technologies:  How Semantic Technology Can Help Real-World IT or, Toward the Semantic Web

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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 31, 2010 5:49 pm

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.

Continue reading 'Semantic Technologies Monthly Review. March 2010'»

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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'»