tiistai 28. elokuuta 2012

Post scriptum on SEMTECHBIZ conference in San Francisco 3-7. 6. 2012

The Semantic Technology & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) was held in SFO in early June-. It was my first time in the series of conferences, so I have no perspective on previous years, but many people concluded that this year there were a bigger number of solid larger customer cases. In addition, some big players were on the move, namely IBM, Oracle and Software AG.

Sorry, this post comes kinda late, but here is my brief summary with some highlights.

Status of semantic technology in business context

My personal hunch is that over the next year or so other big players will take they share of growing semantic information management market and reasons are:

  • Linked Open Data (LOD) is here to stay and it is implemented on top of semantic web technologies and concepts
  • Remarkable co-operation among search giants http://schema.org/ promotes use of RDF in order add semantic metadata on every internet, as well as intra pages in the whole world. Search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.
  • Even though semtech is not yet in the software mainstream, bigger vendors and content providers - who want to take larger share of management of unstructured information – will step forward and embed semtech into their solution.
  • There are some significant enough business cases leading the way, such as Staples integrating their information silos using business ontology. I discussed with some smart people who had interesting and groundbreaking ideas of how to utilize semtech in their organization to create completely new type of business capabilities. IBM is developing their “social CRM”; Wells Fargo looks for solution to survey people’s activities and sentiment regarding critical financial actions, which may be concealed when using traditional tracking of people and their transactions.