Semantic Technologies in Perspective: What Have We Learned, and Where are We Going?

1. Semantic Technologies in Perspective: What Have We Learned, and Where are We Going? Steve Sieck ASIDIC Spring Conference 2010

2. Agenda • Some things we heard today • Some things we didn’t hear today • Some thoughts on the future

3. GENERALISTS The Territory Range SPECIALISTS Depth Where I’m coming from Me Source: adapted from drawing by Dave Gray (http://www.flickr.com/photos/davegray/1183652252/

4. Questions I brought to today’s meeting • How are the definitional relationships changing among the things we describe when we say “semantic web technologies,” “The Semantic Web,” and “smart content” changing? • Where is the ROI on creating “smart content” occurring, and how is it being measured? And what’s next in terms of capturing and measuring business value? • Where are semantic technologies “enabling” new offerings and business strategies, and where are they (more accurately) “enhancing” them? • How is the explosion of social media content being incorporated in “smart content” solutions – and what additional opportunities does it present? • How rapidly are the technologies and applications of smart content evolving? Is there anything (in practical terms) really new?

5. “Smart Content” “Semantic Content Technologies” “Semantic Web Technologies” “Linked Data” “The Semantic Web” How are the (definitional) relationships changing?

6. Where is the ROI? e.g.: • Better discoverability (e.g., improved SEO, inbound contextual linking) • Better product integration & customization (e.g. faceted browsing, contextual linking, workflow integration) • More effective resource management (e.g., digital asset management, rights tracking) • Better personalization (e.g. profiling, alerting, targeted advertising) • Better product planning and development (content usage trends, topical coverage and gaps) • New functionalities (e.g., creation of “instant social networks”) • Enablement of (other) new products and/or new revenue streams

7. “Enhancement”/Existing or “Enablement”/New? McGraw-Hill New Elsevier Illumin8 IEEE? IEEE? Products IEEE? APA Existing McGraw-Hill (finer segments) AACR Existing New Customers

8. How are social media being incorporated?

9. Semantic content technologies and applications: What’s really new? “Semantic indexing was an algebraic model of document retrieval. The approach used singular value decomposition of the vector space of index terms.” – conference speaker, quoted in White and Arnold, Successful Enterprise Search Management Technologies/Approaches Taxonomies/Ontologies/Thesauri XML repositories Statistical analysis Knowledge-based Rules-based Syntactical analysis and parsing Bayesian analysis Neural networks Applications Semantic Search Faceted Browsing Entity and fact extraction Auto-classification Auto-summarization Recommendation systems Text mining Data visualization Trending Sentiment Analysis

10. What’s next? • Linked Data - “an infrastructure upgrade to the back-end of Web to make it work for data” • Adoption led by industries with dense thickets of information to manage (e.g., drug discovery, healthcare, government/security) • Making content accessible to the network – a key role for publishers • Demand increased by flood of real-time data (social, sensors, transactions) in science, business, professions • Consumer (esp. mobile) applications (e.g., Siri) • New business models emerge • Challenges: • Confusing and conflicting messaging • Standards to address privacy and trust issues • Standards to facilitate applications (e.g., “semantic APIs”) • Limited supply of needed skill sets Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/303503677/

11. Semantic advertising and marketing Growth of interest in “semantic marketing” subjects (2008-2010) # of Google search results • Today: • Semantic ad networks (e.g., Google Adsense, Peer39) • Tomorrow: • Advertisers bid on concepts and relationships (rather than keywords or phrases)? • Advertisers pay to have Web content semantically delineated and fielded (RDF, etc.) for Linked Data exposure? • Advertisers pay directory and review publishers for semantically enhanced listings? Search phrases Source: Scott Brinker, chiefmartec.com, Google, SKS Advisors analysis

12. Riding the Linked Data bandwagon BBC Best Buy CNET Data.gov.uk The Guardian New York Times O’Reilly Thomson Reuters …

13. Good advice to publishers • Start simply and improve functionality incrementally • Expect greater things of your authors • Exploit your existing in-house skills fully • Use established standards wherever possible • Publish raw datasets to the Web • Release article metadata, particularly reference lists, in machine-readable form Source: David Shotton, “Semantic Publishing: the coming revolution in scientific journal publishing”

14. Conclusion: Move forward with agility …and realism Some differing bromides apply: “Over-hyped in the short-term, under-hyped in the long term” Semantic techno-logies Smart content solutions “You can’t sell them the solution before they’ve bought the problem” The Semantic Web “Never mistake a clear view for a short distance”

15. Thank you!