SON SON
Being able to reliably mine the Internet for meaningful information has so far been an elusive skill. While whole galaxies of data float in cyberspace, finding exactly what your business requires, quickly and reliably, has until very recently been difficult to achieve due to the incompatibility of many data formats.
Improved access to the Internet’s fertile data fields promises exciting benefits for businesses. A small travel agent, for example, could draw upon a wider pool of online holiday prices, flight offers and hotels to offer customers better service. In finance – where a millisecond’s difference can win or lose you millions – fast, easy electronic access to wider information channels would give businesses a lucrative trading edge.
Established in 2000, the Semantic Web project has recently begun to help organizations unravel the secrets of cyberspace. Development of the Semantic Web is being overseen by the World Wide Web Corporation (W3C). Researchers at HP Laboratories are involved in the project and in the last years they have developed exciting technologies that businesses can use to find, share and integrate greater levels of information much faster.
If the saying “knowledge is power” is true, Ingenta is indeed an extremely powerful organization. The Oxford-based small business has over 20 million documents stored in the IngentaConnect research platform. These are viewed by over 30 million users each month.
Ingenta is able to store this huge amount of data using its revolutionary Metastore. This is supported by Jena, an open-source Java framework recently developed by HP’s Semantic Web Program. Smaller businesses such as Ingenta are beginning to use Semantic Web technologies to share mammoth amounts of information with customers and other companies. In contrast, early-adopting enterprises are using the technology to make sharing massive volumes of internal information much simpler.
For Martin Merry, Semantic Web Research Manager at HP Laboratories in Bristol, unlocking the potential of the Internet is an exciting challenge.
“Our Semantic Web research aims to bring the Web to its full business potential, for example by contributing key technology pieces such as Jena,” said Merry.
“It is gratifying to see the technologies we develop being put to effective commercial use, and we were impressed by Ingenta’s achievements in utilizing Jena.”
Merry sees a fantastic range of business benefits stemming from the Semantic Web. For example, he says many businesses today have trouble exchanging important supply chain information because it is formatted in different codes. This causes delays when ordering goods that disadvantage both parties. The Semantic Web can solve this issue because it easily integrates information from many sources. It converts data to a Resource Description Framework (RDF) format to enable interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the Web. This gives businesses access to new information streams that previously they did not have the capability to read.
Better decision-making
The technology will dramatically improve a business’s access to information, while greatly reducing the time and effort required to access data.
“Any job where a worker has to process information will be sped up,” said Merry. “HP’s Semantic Web tools can convert multiple information streams to one format so they can be read, assimilated and interpreted together.
“And as business needs change, information sources can be added or removed quickly, without major disruption – whereas today this work can take months,” added Merry.
The right knowledge, in the right place can offer you powerful commercial advantages. Semantic Web technologies represent the future of Business Intelligence: Information from everywhere, when and where you require it.