The State of the Market in Semantic Technologies

Tom Tague from Thomson Reuters' OpenCalais team did a keynote speech today at SemTech in San Jose. His presentation was a wonderful wrapup of current semantic technology trends, and what we can expect over the next few years.

Top open, he said that where we are now in the evolution of the Web is content rich, but information poor - plus "experientially deficient". So he said that 'web 3.0' is about cleaning up the mess of web 2.0 and improving interfaces. In terms of semantic technology, he explained that over the past 5 years it has evolved from invention of standards to a period of commercial innovation on top of those inventions. He said that standards are still being worked on, but now "we are at an inflexion point where innovation is exploding."

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Tague called Calais, the project he leads at Thomson Reuters, "a web service a.k.a. plumbing". They've had 13 releases, talked with 100+ customers about Calais, have 13,000 registered developers. He's put the ideas that he's been talking about with customers and developers into 6 buckets, which we've listed with sub-categories below.

Tools

• Semantic data mgmt
• Semantic data generation
• Databases
• Integration and workflow

He said that tools is important and particularly in the enterprise. He sounded a note of caution to tools vendors: they need to simplify their stories, along with "simple basic tools."

Social

• Semantics-powered link sharing
• Network mining
• News sharing
• Tweet mining

He said that we shouldn't focus on providing "frosting" on top of current social Web tools. He said to focus on commercial imperatives, such as the categories above.

Advertising

• Semantic ad placement
• Contextual ad placement
• Semantically driven landing pages
• Mashup ads

He said that there are clearly opportunities to improve advertising using semantci technology.

Search

He said that semantic search may be "the answer to the question nobody is asking." He said that we should look at general "semantic search" vs domain specific semantically-enhanced search. The latter is where the commercial opportunity actually is, but he questioned the economics of general semantic search.

Publishing

He put this into 3 sub-categories:

• A-Content Producers - from back office to user experience
• B-Editorial + Aggregation Publishing Models
• C-Robotic publishing - aggregation only

He said that Calais has really focused on this over the last 8-9 months. He said that classic publishers can get an enormous amount of value from this. He said that right now the big focus is "back in the bolier room," for example to cut editors from 3 to 2. He expects that later on more focus will go on enhancing the user experience.

He said that B is the biggest opportunity, using Huffington Post as an example. He said that it gives a "near newspaper like experience" at perhaps a 5th of the cost. He said that it's an area they're seeing adoption of Calais.

Interface

He said that gaming is a huge industry that the semantic technology industry can learn from. He listed these attributes:

• Great story line
• High interactivity, immediate responsiveness
• No interuptions
• Graphically engaging
• Seamless
• Fun

So he asked who out there is trying to really change the user experience in semantic technology? He listed 4 companies (all of whom we've profiled on ReadWriteWeb):

• Zemanta
• Apture
• Feedly
• Glue

He said that the next big innovation in interface will be something that stays with the user where they are, which will be mobile and in the browser.

To sum up, Tague suggested that semantuc technologies vendors should decide whether they care about semantics or about user value. If it's semantics, then be a tools vendor. He said the basic building blocks are out there already, so focus on user experience.

Disclosure: SemTech has been a recent sponsor of ReadWriteWeb