This blog’s title alludes to the well documented problem of people not being able to find things, mainly within an enterprise environment. Semantic technology has the potential to change that. And having just spent a day and a half at the Semantic Technology conference in San Jose (it goes on for another three days), I can verify that there’s plenty of people who think that it’s on the verge of doing so.
The promise of semantic technology, as Jeff Pollock of Oracle put it at the end of his presentation, is that “finding stuff just got easier.”
I spoke to a lot of people and will be talking to numerous vendors, customers and investors in the coming months, but here’s my initial take:
- Semantic technology will succeed if it’s led out by the consumer market, followed by the enterprise. This is despite the widespread skepticism about the Semantic Web, you know, the bit about it being an untenable, top-down approach to apply meaning to web pages, which I think is itself misunderstood. There’s a couple of major attempts at bring sem tech to the consumer right now: Powerset, a web search engine that launch this month, initiall searching Wikipedia articles and Twine, a social network based on shared interests built by Radar Networks, which will launch fully in the fall, but is in private beta now. Should either of those succeed in terms of usage and Web-scalability, VC funding would follow if proven in a web-scale consumer environment.
- Semantic technology isn’t a market, it’s an enabling technology.Pollock asserted that and I’d agree with him, it’s much like text analysis in that regard (see below).
- Standards are baked – RDF/OWL/XML. There may be some fiddling around the edges, but judging by the number of standards bodies endorsing or adopting those two (OASIS, ISO, W3C and OMG), the job seems to be largely done for now.
- Sem tech vendors and users need to understand that text analysis using NLP or statistical methods isn’t the enemy here, and if you can fix search rather than scoff at it, you might have a winner. I saw too much berating of Google as ‘not getting it’ and text analysis as being ‘shallow’ for my liking.
- Finally, 1,000 people is a lot of people to attract to a conference about semantic technology. It was 600 last year and although I wasn’t there last year, those that were told me it was the first year that people started to move beyond the theoretical (semantic technology has the potential to do this!) to the actual. And given that there were a very large number of European there, a similar conference on that continent would seem to make sense to me – attendees I spoke with didn’t know of such a thing, but if you do, please let me know in the comments.
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8 comments ↓
Great post. Totally agree with Pollock ( and you ) about Semantic Technology being an enabler and not a market. I had the privilege of working with Pollock a number of years back at a startup called Cerebra.
Back then our “semantic engine” was a technology looking for a home. This year more than ever we are seeing real world applications of this technology. Its not fully there yet of course but its a great leap in the right direction.
People are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and i expect the next 5 years or so to produce a real explosion around the semantic web.
Cheers
Prem
Good summary. Adoption by individuals will lead to comfort and recognition of possible efficiencies when applied to work. Key is absolutely what the technology enables, and not that the enablement is based on particular technology. This was my third SemTech, and I’ve seen the crowd grow as well as shift from technical and somewhat academic, to more businesses looking at how to make use. Through this growth, the event has a consistently friendly atmosphere and is run quite efficiently. To your point about Europe, see
http://www.eswc2008.org/ – and while I think it is more academic, see http://iswc.semanticweb.org/ .
Good summary. Adoption by individuals will lead to comfort and recognition of possible efficiencies when applied to work. Key is absolutely what the technology enables, and not that the enablement is based on particular technology. This was my third SemTech, and I’ve seen the crowd grow as well as shift from technical and somewhat academic, to more businesses looking at how to make use. Through this growth, the event has a consistently friendly atmosphere and is run quite efficiently. To your point about Europe, see
http://www.eswc2008.org/ – and while I think it is more academic, see http://iswc.semanticweb.org/ .
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Further to the comment about Europe, the second European Semantic Technology Conference will be held in Vienna in September. For more information about the programme visit http://www.estc2008.com
The theme of the event is about semantic technology is more than just semantic web and the technology is coming out of the lab into business apps
@ Daniel. Thanks for that information about the conference. Unfortunately I can’t get there this time, but will try to next year.
Nick