Dr. Richard Benjamins' Blog

A happy country

2010-07-12T23:51:00.001+02:00

À Dutch in Spain

2010-07-10T14:43:00.001+02:00

-- Richard

Sent from iphone.

Real Customer Insight?

2009-07-03T10:51:00.001+02:00

I recently read the book “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” by Martin Lindstrom. Apart from the fact that it is written in a bit populist way, the basic ideas are quite interesting. The book reports on research where researchers looked into the brains of people using techniques such as fMRI when being exposed to advertisements, brands, etc, and crossed observed brain activity with known brain activity patterns for fear, interest, excitement, etc. While the main goal of the book is the study the effectiveness of advertising, it also has many general lessons to learn. The research underpins notions such as what people say does not always correspond to what they really think (e.g. few people say they like reality shows, but they are enormously popular). Of course, for companies this provides a powerful tool to be more efficient in deciding what products to deliver to the market.

All companies strive towards getting a better customer insight such that they can serve customers with products they really need, like, want, etc. Different approaches are applied, including trend spotting, surveys, user experience labs, living labs and data mining. This book seems to add a new, yet still somewhat expensive, approach to get closer to real customer insight. I am curious to see whether and when it will find its way to marketing on a global scale.

Dinner Speech at ICAIL 2009

2009-06-17T22:58:00.003+02:00

On June 10, I gave an invited dinner speech at the ICAIL 2009, the Twelfth International Conference on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and LAW in Barcelona. I never gave an invited talk during dinner at a conference, and the speeches I have seen at other dinners where more funny (and much work to prepare) than serious. However, Dr. Pompeu Casanovas, the Conference Chairman, assured me that at ICAIL people were used to serious dinner speeches.

A few months ago I changed responsibilities from technological strategy to user modelling and profiling, so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to an audience of experts in both informatics and law, or, in other words in “privacy”. From a technological point of view, semantic technology is a hot topic at ICAIL and Pompeu asked me to talk about that. I also was aware that the conference attendants were mostly academic researchers from universities and research institutions, and less from industry, and therefore I decided to focus more on the business side than on the technology side.

The title of the talk was “Do semantics matter for business (in large Corporations)”, and the main message I wanted to convey is that –no matter how good or cool it is- it is a complex process to get a new technology adopted in large organizations. There are tens or sometimes even hundreds of other relevant technologies fighting for a place in large corporations. New technologies always involve risk, and large organizations are not always prepared to deal with a lot of technological risk. Moreover, I tried to make clear that innovation is not only about technology, but mostly about customers and business. Customers need to like the product or service, and it needs to be profitable from a business or society point of view, otherwise the technology does not make sense.

Given the fact that I started to talk at 22h00, I didn’t expect a lot of questions. But to my surprise the question session was actually longer than the talk itself. There were basically two types of questions: about privacy and questions rooted in “mindset” differences between academia and business (e.g. how and when do we value the results of research; through publications, patents, or when it is taken up in the market or society?).

The talk can be downloaded here in pdf. Enjoy, and “eet smakelijk”…

Interview for German TV, Mobile World Congress

2009-02-26T18:22:00.004+01:00

End of January 2009, I was interviewed by the German TV 3sat channel for a program called “Neues”, a weekly program (Sunday, 4.30 p.m.) produced by the public TV station 3sat and broadcasted in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (www.3sat.de/neues/). It focuses on computers, telecommunications and consumer electronics. The program covers current products and topics as well as long-term trends. The interview forms part of a reportage (min 2:17 and 3:20) about Telefonica and its presence at the Mobile World Congress that took place from Feb. 16-19 in Barcelona.

It was an interesting experience and a lot of activity for a few seconds of movie…

The questions that I answered included:

1. Telefonica is the leader of Telcos worldwide. How you would like to tighten this position?
2. Isn´t it very difficult to keep this position, cause Telefonica has activities in very different countries?
3. At the MWC will be present some very important technologies. For example NFC. Is it important for some future projects of Telefonica and when do you think there will be a breakthrough in the mass market?
4. Do you think the fixed network will have a future?
5. Which market is much more important, the South American or the European?
6. Is Telefonica developing some wireless standards after wimax or hsdpa?
7. Do you think there will be some bounds in the future for wireless technologies like LTE?
8. Where do you see Telefonica in 10 years?

See for yourself which of them have been selected for the reportage.
Enjoy!

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year

2008-12-25T22:04:00.002+01:00

Hoping the best for 2009. Wishing you the best for 2009.

R&D in Spain

2008-11-06T22:56:00.005+01:00

On Nov 6, I participated in a discussion on TV about the situation in Spain with respect to investment in R&D in comparison with the rest of the world. The program has been broadcasted on InterEconomia TV (click here to see it). Some quick numbers. Only three Spanish companies in the top100. Telefonica, with an investment of 600M euros in 2007, is number 40, and invest 4 times as much as the second Spanish company (Indra). Telefonica is responsible for almost 45% of the total Spanish investment in R&D, and if one looks at the IBEX 35 companies, Telefonica is responsible for 85%. By far Telefonica is the largest Spanish company investing in R&D, and as such serves as a national R&D motor, helping many small companies and universities in accessing R&D funds .

Interested in why this is the case? Have a look at the program (20 min). Enjoy!

Hybrid Worlds

2008-10-26T22:25:00.001+01:00

Since the financial crisis started, I have the feeling that "Hybrid Worlds" have become a reality. In "hybrid worlds" the virtual and physical worlds come together; the internet and the real world, virtual reality, etc. In this financial crisis, it seems that financial instituations (physical world) and their stock value (virtual world) have come very integrated. The connection is as follows: a bank possesses many assets, many of them are on the stock exchange. Those assets go down in the crisis, and so thus the value of the bank. In order to accomodate for this (virtual)loss, the bank needs to make provisions. If the losses are too big, the bank needs government help, or it goes bankrupt. Nothing more physical then a bank going bankrupt. But physically, the bank is exactly the same as before. It is the virtual world that has taken over ...

The Ambidextrous Organization

2008-08-27T15:26:00.001+02:00

To achieve successful R&D and real innovation (bringing new things successfully to markets) is easy on paper but very hard in practice. Thousands of enterprises are struggling with this using a variety of methods, methodologies, instruments and organizations. Typical problems include how to ensure proper technology transfer, how (de)centralized should R&D and innovation be, how to initiate and foster new business, what is the right balance between short (improving existing business), medium and long term (create new business), etc, etc.

Recently I was recommended to read a 2004 article of the Harvard Business Review called “The Ambidextrous Organization”. It says, among others, that one of the main challenges companies face is to -at the same time- exploit existing business and explore new business. Companies need to be able to look backward and forward at the same time, while those two activities have very different requirements (e.g. in strategic intent, critical tasks, competencies, structure, compensation, culture, etc). Not surprisingly, companies struggle to deal with those conflicting requirements. In this article, the authors have investigated 35 attempts to launch breakthrough innovations in different industries. Their study shows that organizations use one of four possible ways to manage those innovations within their organizational structure. By far, the ambidextrous organization is the most (and only) successful one. An ambidextrous organization isolates the operation of the new business from the existing business by giving it freedom to organize and structure itself as appropriate, while it uses top-level executive involvement to keep the new business connected to the organization. Top-level involvement ensures visibility of the new business to the decision organs and evidences importance of the initiative to the organizations.

This makes a lot of sense and seems relatively straightforward to apply. But how easy is it to put in practice in real organizations ….?

Enjoy!

Google's Innovation Machine

2008-05-07T16:56:00.002+02:00

The April edition of The Harvard Business Review features an article about how Google performs and manages its innovation: Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine. The article explains Google’s innovation ecosystem, which includes Content Providers, Consumers, Advertisers and Innovators. The ecosystem helps Google to know and involve its customers, to serve as a platform for third parties for delivering their services, and to provide value for advertisers. All information passes through Google’s infrastructure providing it with a wealth of relevant information on user preferences, actual use of services, etc.

It describes Google’s 1200 quarter forecast (300y), which provides the company with a long term vision and mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Part of this vision is currently being monetized through advertisement.

It also details to some extent the famous 20% that Google employees have to spend on innovation (other things than their daily business).

An interesting case study, especially for telcos, which are currently reflecting on whether they should continue to be only a “dump pipe”, or, in addition, a “smart pipe”, or even a “service provider”.

Enjoy!

Business in Bottom of Pyramid Countries?

2008-04-14T22:56:00.003+02:00

Recently I read a paper of Prahalad and Hammond that was already published in the Harvard Business Review as early as 2002. Now in 2008, it still seems very interesting, actual and worthwhile pursuing. The title of the article “Serving the World’s Poor, Profitably.” The paper tells that large multinational companies can do good for the poorest people in the world. A free version of the paper can be downloaded from the World Resources Institute (http://pdf.wri.org/whatworks_serving_profitably.pdf). In this post I will briefly write the things that most attracted my attention.

Being poor is expensive. In the Indian city of Mumbai, prices of the same articles are consistently higher in poor areas than in upper-class areas. Articles include credits, water, phone calls, diarrhea medication and rice and prices range from 1.2x to 53x more expensive. The main reason is the lack of efficient distribution channels.

The world pyramid. 100M people have an average annual salary of more than 20.000$. 2 billion people earn between 2.000-20.000$, and 4 billion people earn less than 2.000$. Usually, multinational corporations serve the 100M rich people, assuming that the bottom of the period (BOP) cannot afford their services. The paper shows that this is not necessarily true (on the contrary) and that many poor people do want to spend some money on services and/or products. E.g., in the same town of Mumbai, 85% of the household own a TV set, while not having a proper house. The telco Grameen provides many BOP people with mobile access by having villagers in rural areas share one mobile line. Whereas each person maybe spends very little money on communication, a large village may spend as much as 1000$ per month.
The paper argues that one should not underestimate the improvements that for example communications infrastructure can provide to the poorest people. Globalization is often (rightly) associated with outsourcing part of the value chain to cheap (and thus poor) countries. But Prahalad and Hammond show that it can also be different.

The business interest is manifold. First, there is a huge opportunity for growth in terms of customers. Second, usually conditions of operating in BOP countries are very harsh, forcing companies to provide innovative solutions. Once those solutions work in the difficult environments, moving those solutions to more friendly markets may result more efficiency and in significant savings. Many large companies, therefore, setup an R&D centre in BOP countries focused on local opportunities. There exists a telecommunications operator that is only operating in poor countries that has an EBITDA as high as 65%

My conclusion is that while many of us rule out the possibility to do business in BOP countries because 1) we think there is no business, 2) conditions are very difficult (humanitarian, political, nature), 3) we want (or need) to be a social responsible corporation, and 4) the kind of managerial skills needed are totally different, it actually makes a lot of sense to consider BOP markets seriously.

The authors’ answer to the question “is it worth the effort?” “Big corporations should solve big problems.”

Patents in Spain

2008-01-04T14:04:00.001+01:00

The other day I had a meeting with the Spanish Office for Patents and Trademarks. They gave me some high-level indicators of the situation of patents in Spain. The figures are taken from the notes I took during the conversation, so they may not be accurate. Nevertheless, they are interesting and show the (poor) state of play in Spain.

3000 Patents per year in Spain
—CSIC: 130 patents/y
—All univs: 300 patents/y
—Grupo Antolin: 20/y
—Most patents are in pharma sector
—350 patents/year in ICT area
EPO denies 20% of patents
—What is accepted usually is modified since original filing
ICT patents typically last around 7 to 8 years
5% of patents reach market
Two types of patents
—High quality (with exam)
—Low quality (no exam)
Filing patent in Spain costs 480€, legal support up to 3000€
12-18 months between filing patent in Spain and decision of world-wide coverage (involves costs)

Judge for yourself, but I think we have some work to do here ...

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year

2007-12-25T21:48:00.000+01:00

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year to all of you. May 2008 bring tolerance, health, happiness to all of you, and peace to the world.

Trip to South Korea

2007-11-17T17:45:00.000+01:00

From 19-23 November, 2007 I will visit South Korea in search for the latest developments in ICT. We will visit several small and large companies. I will post some multimedia information on my TV channel@kyte (clicking on the channel activates the control to move backward and forward through the content).

Beyond the (current) web

2007-11-03T23:14:00.000+01:00

End of October, I gave a lecture at the University CarlosIII in Madrid -in the context of a Master in Web Engineering- about what I consider to be beyond the current web. In a nutshell, it means more intelligence, everywhere (operationalized in this lecture by Semantic Technologies and Ambient Intelligence). If you understand Spanish you can see the lecture (60 min) here.

Everybody can be a journalist and publisher (in realtime)

2007-10-27T17:58:00.000+02:00

I started testing out kyte, a web/mobile application that let's you post multimedia content (pictures, text, movies, sound, etc.) in realtime. Content can be uploaded from a browser (drag and drop), and from mobile phones and PDAs; it is straightforward. In a sense, it gives anyone his/her personal TV channel. Mine is here (only test material so far).

And below I embed the channel (http://www.kyte.tv/rbenjamins) directly.

If you don't see anything, it isn't that easy, afterall...

Use and Abuse of Internet

2007-09-30T15:39:00.000+02:00

The Science and Technology Committee of the House of Lords has published an extensive report on Personal Security on the Internet in the context of crime and organized abuse (pdf here). Their conclusion is that e-crime is increasing in a rapid way, but there is still time for governments to take appropriate action:

"The threat to the Internet is clear, but it is still manageable. Now is the time to act, both domestically, and internationally, through the European Union and through international organisations and partnerships."

Whatever measures (no measure is also a measure) are proposed, they will always provoke reactions that go in all directions: from "this will kill the spirit of Internet" to "this still will leave many security holes", and all positions in-between those extremes. Ideal policies do not exist; all of them have advantages and disadvantages. It is the weighing of those (dis)advantages that makes the policy. A useful question to ask oneself in such situations is: “What is worse?” which in this case translates to:

What is worse? Making Internet so secure that no abuse is possible, but that at the same time kills the proper nature of Internet? Or, keeping Internet open, thereby taking for granted that some abuse will occur?

How much abuse are we willing to tolerate? To what extent do we accept to limit new possibilities and opportunities offered by this new instrument, for the sake of security?

Those are the real questions, but there is nothing new to those questions. Politicians deal with them on a daily basis (not saying that they take the right decisions …)

Monitoring for Technological Strategy

2007-09-02T18:16:00.000+02:00

To be competitive in a fast changing, global environment requires monitoring many different things (competitors, technology, social trends, economies, countries, etc) in different places (physical, virtual). In this post, I am concerned with technology. How does one know what technology to monitor? There are many considerations, aspects, view points, trade-offs to take into account. The sketched figure shows the main ideas (to be improved).

Many large organizations have a strategic focus for a particular time frame. This focus provides an overall context for what technologies to monitor. It is important to notice that monitoring a technology involves much more than the technology alone. Monitoring a technology because it seems a nice technology does not help. Important notions to consider while monitoring include the business context, potential applications, market readiness, economics, society aspects, legal issues, etc. In this sense, the word “technology” is too limited to express what we need to cover. It would be more appropriate to refer to technological trends in a market, society and business context.

Apart from the strategic focus, additional factors that determine what technology trends to monitor include what your competitors are doing and what technological trends are emerging.

All those inputs help us in deciding what technologies (or “concepts”) to monitor. The result can be seen as a “technology/concept map”. This map tells us where we should put our effort in our monitoring activity. Notice that the map itself is a living thing, which needs regular updates, and in particular upon changes of the strategic focus, new emerging technologies, social changes that make existing technologies suddenly relevant, competitor activities, etc.

Once we know what to monitor, we still need to find out the best way to monitor each technology, i.e. what antennas to use and where. The following dimensions for characterizing technologies may be of help in this respect:

- Market readiness
- Technological maturity
- Legal aspects related to the use of the technology
- Social acceptation
- Applicability for the different business lines (the more the better)
- Applicability horizon for the business
- Technologies potentially provided by providers (especially for those with a short horizon, e.g. less than one year)
- Skills available in-house
- Available partners
- Etc.

All those factors help us in deciding when we should know about the technologies/concepts. Before it becomes business, before it appears in popular press, or before appearing in specialized press, before it enters the blogosphere, before it enters the research world, or before it enters garage startups, or even before it happens … It is common sense that the earlier one wants to be informed, the more expensive and difficult it is. It is simple to discover that a company offers a new service by reading it in the technology supplement of a newspaper. Low cost, low risk, but also low strategic value. On the other hand, to discover that a small startup constructs key technology for building a competitive edge in your business (and before the whole world knows it) is difficult and expensive. High cost, high risk, but high potential strategic value.

Corresponding to the different time frames desired for monitoring things, different methods apply from using Internet (reading blogs, search engines, intelligent agents, etc, to having your people in situ close to where things tend to happen. Those are two extremes in between which there are many different options, each with its advantages and disadvantages. This trade-off requires explicit decisions.

Once decisions are made, we have all parameters defined for setting up our Technology Observatory relevant for our strategic focus. The result of the observatory is a set of actions and/or recommendations for each technology concerned, such as passive monitoring, setting up a consortium, pursuing standards, partner with other organizations, buy a company, delete, etc. This can be expressed in another map, let’s say the technology/concept recommendation map. Moreover, sometimes it is possible to find external funding and partners to monitor a certain technology or relevant aspect of it.

The technology observatory may provide relevant information for different target audiences. The obvious one is the top management of the organization, but other targets include middle management, the whole company, partners and even the outside world. Each audience may require its own format, in order to ensure that the information arrives, and is actively consumed by the right people at the right time. The whole enterprise of technology monitoring is a waste of effort and money if this last step is not taken care of.

There are two relevant feedback loops to be aware of, and to stimulate. Monitoring the technology trends may change the technology/concept map by additions, deletions or modifications. Another and more profound feedback is to modify the strategic focus of the organization based on the technology observation performed. It may be the case that some observation suddenly opens a new business perspective to such extent that the strategic focus needs to be changed accordingly.

Technological Strategy 2.0

2007-08-02T18:32:00.001+02:00

There are many ways to make a strategical technology plan for a company. One can analyze lots of relevant information, do a synthesis and come up with a plan. One of the key points is to decide what information to analyze, and what aspects to include.

If web3.0 already existed in its full extent, I could just type in some phrase such as "Find me relevant aspects for defining a Technological Strategy in the Telecommunitacions sector taking into account concepts like ICT, Internet, Multimedia, Ambient Intelligence, Intelligent neworks", and I would get relevant information to consider. Unfortunately, web3.0 is not yet there in this extent.

But maybe web2.0 can help out? Maybe there is a community out there that can suggest interesting things to take into account for defining such a plan.

Open innovation? Innovation 2.0? Name it what you want. I invite everybody to react with relevant concepts, notions, technologies, trends, business ideas, etc, etc. to contribute to such a technological plan in an innovative way ...

Thank you in advance!

Change of focus

2007-08-02T18:30:00.001+02:00

Due to my professional change, I have adapted the topic of the blog to the more general topic of technological innovation.

A typical story on Innovation: Europe versus US

2007-07-27T10:28:00.000+02:00

Business Week has published an interesting article on the battle between Europe and US concerning Semantic Web (or Web3.0) technology. A nice illustration of how innovations usually happen, with some hope for a change in favor of Europe.

Enjoy!

Change

2007-07-13T13:44:00.000+02:00

Last month it has been silent on my blog. That usually happens when something is cooking ... Today is my last day working at iSOCO as I will move to Telefonica Research and Development. Below you can find the "official" announcement.

I will continue to write this blog, but the topic may shift a bit. See you in August.

Stay tuned!

________________________________________
Dear friends and colleagues,

After 7 years of full time dedication to iSOCO, I will leave its daily operations from end of July, 2007. I will remain, though, a member of iSOCO’s Board of Directors.

I accepted a new position as Director of Technological Strategy at Telefónica R&D.

I am sure we will stay in touch, either through opportunities arising from my new position, or through my continued involvement in iSOCO.

Kind regards,
-- Richard
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Apreciad@s amig@s,

Después de 7 años de dedicación completa en iSOCO, dejaré el día a día de la empresa a partir de finales de julio, 2007. Seguiré, no obstante, formando parte del Consejo de Administración.

He aceptado un nuevo reto como Director de Estrategia Tecnológica en Telefónica I+D.

Estoy seguro de que seguiremos en contacto, ya sea con las nuevas oportunidades que nos vayan surgiendo, o bien a través de iSOCO.

Cordialmente,
-- Richard
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Beste vrienden en collegas,

Na 7 jaar toewijding aan iSOCO, trek ik me –per eind juli 2007- terug uit de dagelijkse leiding van het bedrijf. Ik blijf wel lid van de Raad van Bestuur.

Ik neem de positie in van Directeur “Technologische Strategie” in Telefónica Onderzoek en Ontwikkeling in Madrid, Spanje.

Ik ben ervan overtuigd dat we contact zullen houden; vanwege mogelijkheden in mijn nieuwe positie, of via mijn blijvende verbondenheid aan iSOCO.

Vriendelijke groeten,
-- Richard

Invited talks of ESTC 2007, Vienna

2007-06-06T17:59:00.000+02:00

The first European Semantic Technologies Conference is over. We had 220 registered visitors, of which 80% from industry. A big success taking into account that it was the first edition.

The Invited talks can be downloaded in pdf.

Prof. Frank van Harmelen, Semantic Technologies anno 2007: main streams, popular falacies,
current status, future challenges (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Dr. Mark Greaves, The Relationship Between Web 2.0 And the Semantic Web (Vulcan Inc.)

Ora Lassila, From the Semantic Web to a Broader Vision of Personal Computing (Nokia)

Dave Pearson, Delivering Business Value with Semantic Technology (Oracle)

Dr. Susie Stephens, Integrating Enterprise Data with Semantic Web Technologies (Eli Lilly)

Dr. Benjamin Grosof, Commercializing Semantic Web:Rules, Services, and Roadmapping (MIT, Vulcan Inc.)

Dr. Michael Brody (Verizon)

Also downloadable from the ESTC 2007 website.

Enjoy!

W3C SWEO Publishes Case Studies

2007-06-06T10:43:00.000+02:00

The Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group (SWEO) of the World-Wide Web Consortium, headed by Tim Berners-Lee, publishes a list of concrete applications based on Semantic Technologies, presented by clients, rather than by technology vendors/providers. The list will be augmented as new applications are submitted. As of June 6, 2007, the list contains 18 applications, of which five are using semantic technology of iSOCO.

The announcement has been made by Susie Stephen of Eli Lilly and is reproduced here:

"The Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group is pleased to announce the first set of Case Studies and Use Cases giving some examples of how the Semantic Web of machine readable data is used today. Applications are presented in areas ranging from automotive to health care, and from B2B systems to geographical information systems. The SWEO Interest Group will continue to publish new Case Studies and Use Cases in the future; an RSS feed for new submissions is available. A short overview is also available in Open Document Format, PDF, and HTML formats. "

1st European Semantic Technology Conference

2007-05-28T19:07:00.000+02:00

This week, on Thursday, May 30 and Friday, June 1, the First European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC2007) takes place in Vienna. The final, detailed program can be found here (pdf, 3MB).

70% of the participants is coming from industry, which is the target audience. Major companies attending include SAP, Nokia, Oracle, France Telecom, British Telecom, T-Systems, Vodafone, Siemens, Telefonica, Verizon, and Atos Origin. Spanish organizatinos involved include among others Vodafone, Bankinter, City of Zaragoza, Fundación M. Botín, Atos Origin and Telefonica.

Sectors where Semantic Technology is applied and that present at ESTC include Public Sector, Telecommunications, Automotive, Aerospace, Cultural Heritage, Healthcare & Lifesciences, Media and eBusiness.

Countries well represented include Austria, Germany, UK, Spain, France, Norway and the Netherlands.

Press release in El País can be found here (pdf).

New Gartner Report on Semantic Technologies

2007-05-22T17:53:00.000+02:00

In a recent report of May 9, 2007, Gartner gives its view and recommendations to organizations concerning “Finding and Exploiting Value in Semantic Technologies on the Web”. You can buy it here. My interpretation of this report is:

Value Proposition

Semantic Technologies will are gradually being taken up by organizations.

It will offer extraordinary advances for exploitation and visibility of information, in particular regarding the automatic interpretation of documents (unstructured information), i.e. without human intervention.

This will unleash information in organizations that currently is hidden in documents such as html, doc, ppt. pdf, xls, etc.

Industry Uptake and Recommendation to Organizations

Industry uptake will be gradual starting with focused applications using semantic hypertext (microformats, a Web2.0 technology) that embeds semantic tags in web pages

By carefully selecting focused projects to start with, Industry can already gain significantly today

Prediction

In the next 10 years, web-based technologies will be increasingly able to embed semantics in documents.

By 2012, 70% of public web pages are expected to include some level of semantic mark-up

The full blown public semantic web, using OWL, will take several more years to come to maturity.

In short, the web will gradually incorporate semantics starting with lightweight semantic hypertext (microformats) to more heavyweight ontologies. This vision is consistent with my own experience with clients: start small and simple, but with the big picture in mind. Semantic technologies owe to Web2.0 technologies -where semantic tags are attached to content out of pure necessity- in the sense that it is now widely recognized that (some kind of) semantics is needed to keep the web a friendly place to be. Some people (e.g. Mor Naaman of Yahoo!Research) express the same trend in a (very) different way, but the essence of the message is the same.

Free Office to PDF converter

2007-05-21T13:25:00.000+02:00

http://www.pdf995.com/
In my experience, much quicker and more robust than Adobe's. The reason for posting this on my blog, while it has nothing to do with Intelligent Applications, is that I generate lots of PDF documents from MS Office (Word, PPT), and more often than I want, I waste time in this process through slowness and errors of PDF writer (at least on my machines).

So I thought maybe others experience the same problems in execution of this boring task.

EC publishes statistics of FP7, ICT, Call1 Submissions

2007-05-21T10:34:00.000+02:00

In total, 1838 proposals have been submitted. Popular areas include: Future Network (175), Software and Services (184), Cognitive Systems (184), Digital Libraries (191), Content and Semantics (149), and Ageing (152).

Lots of competition! Who is going to evaluate all this, with so many experts involved in the proposals. For all evaluators, make sure you reserve your hotels in Brussels as soon as possible. It will be crowded in June ...

The overview can be downloaded (pdf) from the CDTI website (among others, I am sure).

Enjoy!

The Future of Search Engines (outgoing links in Spanish)

2007-05-14T14:38:00.000+02:00

On May 10, 2007 in the beautiful city of Santiago de Compostela I participated in a round table discussion on the future of search engines. The event was organized by FESABID: the tenth Spanish Days of Documentation. This is the main Spanish event for libraries and other institutions that manage very many documents. About 800 persons attended. The panel was formed by (in parenthesis appear the topics of the talk):

Richard Benjamins, iSOCO (Vertical search engines and Semantic Technology)

Eva Méndez, Universidad Carlos III (Dublin Core)

José Ramón Pérez Agüera, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (IR algorithms, Semantics and Natural Language Processing).

Antonio Pareja Lora, UCM, colaborador del Grupo de Ingeniería Ontológica (OEG) de la UPM (Ontologies)

Antonio S. Valderrábanos, Bitext.com (Natural Language Processing)

Isidro Aguillo, CINDOC/CSIC (moderator)

The presentations given by the panel members formed an interesting mix of different by complementary views on the matter of search engines: an excellent starting point for setting up a new breakthrough project to advance the state of the art.

The presentations of the whole conference are made available here. My presentation can be downloaded here.

Norwegian Semantic Days 2007

2007-04-23T17:53:00.000+02:00

On April 23, 24 the Norwegian Semantic Days, 2007 will take (took) place in Stavanger. I will give a keynote on Semantic Solutions for the Enterprise, which can be downloaded here.

Speakers of other keynotes include Ivan Herman of W3C, Ian Horrocks of University of Manchester and Susie Stephens of Eli Lilly and responsible for W3C's Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group.

All presentations given at the conference can be downloaded here.

BusinessWeek about the Semantic Web

2007-04-20T16:18:00.000+02:00

In a special report on April 9, 2007, Businessweek published several interesting things about the Semantic Web on its website. There is an article called "Taming the World Wide Web", starting with the explaining the value of this technology for the pharmaceutical sector. There is also a podcast, called "The CEO Guide to the Semantic Web".

Enjoy (I use this blog also as a kind of storage for relevant pointers).

A New Generation Search Engines

2007-04-10T10:33:00.000+02:00

The Financial Times recently published a short note: “New tools to vie with Google”, which briefly describes –from a user point of view- some of the new generation search engines. It includes new search engines like:

http://www.ask.com/
http://www.powerset.com/
http://www.askmenow.com/
http://www.hakia.com/
http://www.digger.com/
http://www.blinkx.com/ (video clips)
http://www.retrivo.com/ (electronics products)
http://www.kosmix.com/ (health, travel, finance, US politics)

All those search engines allow queries in natural language, and they claim to use NLP and semantics to “understand” the content.

In my understanding, there are two ways where NLP and Semantics can play a role:

Interpreting the user query. This is what most new search engines claim to do.
“Understanding” the content to be indexed. This requires that at index time, not only the individual words of the content (documents) are indexed, but indexing also considers NLP and Semantics. It is unclear to what extent those “new” search engines apply this for indexing. Yet another possibility is to launch the query against structured information (e.g. RDF).

I usually summarize the above two points in respectively Semantics in Access and Semantics in the Source. The latter is obviously much harder than the former, and a real challenge for the next generation search engines.

The short note of Paul Taylor also mentions several “search” engines for comparing prices of products available on the web, including

Shopzilla
Pricegrabber
Shopping.com

While the note talks about those “shopping bots” for consumers, also providers (the businesses) may have interest in such tools for tracking their products at resellers’ sites and for automatically tracking their competitors’ products.

The Impact of "IT on demand"

2007-04-09T19:46:00.000+02:00

Amazon are known for selling books, CD and recently also grocery. Amazon have millions of customers, and in order to attend all those customers, they have built up a scalable infrastructure with a huge amount of storage and computation capacity. Based on their experience they recently have started to rent out parts of their IT infrastructure as Web Services. Currently 10 web services are available. The three most important ones are:

Simple storage. Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Mechanical Turk. Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate “Artificial” Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans.
Elastic computing clouds. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

This trend is important for several reasons. For future providers of such web services, it creates new business models for companies who have invested significant budget in IT infrastructure. What was viewed as a necessary evil is turned into a new source of revenue.

The benefit for potential buyers/users of such web services, is that it frees them from having to think about and invest in IT and computing infrastructure. The barrier to start up an ecommerce business becomes lower, by making much more flexible and controllable the associated IT costs.

Searching content of images

2007-04-06T12:58:00.000+02:00

A few days ago I mentioned the game approach for annotating images of Louis von Ahn, that makes use of free computation cycles of humans. A straigthforward use of the side effect of playing the games milliones of times, is a search engine for images. Here you can try prototypes for two search image engines:

Search for images according to overall subject of image
Search for objects within images

Although the amount of images considered is still limited (tens of thousands), the approach seems promising.

The Web of Data

2007-04-05T17:39:00.000+02:00

In this movie, Tim Berners-Lee explains the Web of Data, one of the goals of the Semantic Web. It provides several concrete examples of what the Semantic Web would be useful for from an end user point of view. Enjoy!

Usability and Innovations

2007-04-04T19:18:00.000+02:00

For any innovation it takes effort for users to accept it. What seems straightforward for the inventors (or developers), may be actually very hard for the targeted user group. This is very well illustrated in this movie available at youtube.

Web2.0 to the extreme

2007-04-04T15:08:00.000+02:00

I recently saw the invited talk of Louis von Ahn at Google. It is simply great! Innovation, simplicity with huge potential. The perfect balance between computer and human computing power. Scientist are working for years on solving the problem of automatic image understanding, and Louis solves it with a completely new paradigm (human computation). SETI, but than with free computing cycles of humans ...

Semantic Technology Annual Conference 2007 in Korea

2007-03-29T01:24:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, March 28, 2007 the South Korean Semantic Technology Annual Conference took place. Over 200 people attended, of which about 175 came from industry; a very good sign of industrial interest in corporate semantic web technology. The conferene was hosted by SemTech Korea and took place in the RitzCarlton Hotel en Seoul (see phote left). The conference was chaired by Dr. Lee, CEO of Saltlux.

Dieter Fensel of Deri gave a talk on Service Web3.0. The future web will contain billions of services and proper management of those services (discovery, composition, execution, etc.) requires a semantic infrastucture. Prof. Fensel also showed the famous "DIP" movie that explains the business value of Semantic Web Services for industry (see photo below for the financial industry). I gave a talk on today's applications that use Semantic Technology; 7 concrete applications that we built in iSOCO for clients. Mike Ullrich from Ontoprise presented use cases of Semantic Applications. Prof. Riichiro Mizoguchi from Osaka University gave a presentation on the industrial impact of Ontology Engineering.

Below a few photos to give an impression of the conference.

This is the first time that I have been to Seoul, South Korea. In 1997 I visited Japan for the IJCAI conference. South Korea is a remarkable country. 20 years ago it was a poor county, now it is the eleventh economic power in the world. It is one of the global leaders in penetration of broadband internet and home of the world-wide known brands such as LG, Samsung, Kia, Hyundai and Daewoo. My impression of the city is a mixture between oriental and western (especially US, several Starbucks ...) culture. Doing business in Korea is also quite different from Europe, but while doing and reading one learns.

The photo below is the view on Seoul from my hotel room on the 14th floor.

The first pages of the Semantic Web? (1998), and Web2.0?

2007-02-07T15:52:00.000+01:00

I guess everybody now and then performs an “ego search” or “ego surf”, to see what search engines give back by typing in your name and then navigating to those pages. In my case, since more than 10 years, “Richard Benjamins” gives my (old) homepage of the University of Amsterdam, where I worked between 1989 and 2000 (with temporal yearly stays at universities in Sao Paulo, Paris and Barcelona), until I joined iSOCO. Today, Google still gives the same result: http://hcs.science.uva.nl/usr/richard/home.html (sometimes a bit frustrating, where is the (Google) impact of my current work? :-).

Since I left the University of Amsterdam, I have had no access to my former homepage, so I have not been able to make any changes. At the bottom of the page you can read: “This page was last updated on 12/08/1998.” Almost 10 years ago! At the beginning, I was annoyed that I could not update the page. However, now I am actually quite happy that the page hasn’t changed since then, because it may qualify for the oldest Semantic Web page still accessible on the web (even though I think that Jim Hendler’s semantically annotated homepage appeared even earlier).

To check the “semantic webness” of the page, view the source code of the following pages:

The home page:
http://hcs.science.uva.nl/usr/richard/home.html. You will see tags in the html code “onto” that represent the semantics of terms appearing on the web page.

<a onto="page[firstName=body]">Richard</a>
<a onto="page[lastName=body]">Benjamins </a>
<A HREF="http://hcs.science.uva.nl/" onto="page[affiliation=body]"target="_top">
Dept. of Social Science Informatics (SWI)</A>
<A HREF="mailto:richard@swi.psy.uva.nl" onto="page[email=href]">

Or the publication page:
http://hcs.science.uva.nl/usr/richard/publications/pub-type.html

A semantic annotation for a book publication:

<a name="Plaza:97a" onto="name:Book"> </a>
<a name="Plaza:97a" onto="name[editor=body]"> Enric Plaza</a>,
<a name="Plaza:97a" onto="name[editor=href]"
href="http://www.iiia.csic.es/~richard/index.html">
Richard Benjamins </a> (Editors),
<a name="Plaza:97a" onto="name[title=body]"> LNAI 1319:
Knowledge Acquisition, Modeling and Management.
Proceedings of the 10th EKAW. </a>
<a name="Plaza:97a" onto="name[publisher=body]"> Springer-Verlag</a>,
<a name="Plaza:97a" onto="name[year=body]">1997</a>. <P>

Or on the projects page:
http://hcs.science.uva.nl/usr/richard/projects.html
<A HREF=http://www2.cordis.lu/tmr/src/grants/fmbi/950550.htm
onto="href:Project" onto="page[worksAtProject=href]">
Cordis entry of Using a Library with Reusable Problem-Solving
Methods to Configure Flexible and Robust Problem Solvers</A>

All those terms are (or were) specified in an ontology that was located somewhere else on a server, in this case in Karlsruhe at the AIFB institute.

This was at the time that XML began to become popular, and way before RDF and OWL came into existence. The project was called (KA)2: Knowledge Acquisition for the Knowledge Acquisition Community. How it works (or worked) can be read in:

V. R. Benjamins, D. Fensel, S. Decker and A. Gomez Perez: (KA)2: Building Ontologies for the Internet: a Mid Term Report. In the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 51:687-712, 1999, of which an extra official version can be found at here.

This was -to my knowledge- the first European Semantic Web project, whose idea was born at IJCAI 1997 in Nagoya, Japan during a train trip from Nagoya to Kyoto which I made with Dieter Fensel.

A lighter version of the paper can be accessed at the former so-called Banff Workshops, in 1998: V. Richard Benjamins and Dieter Fensel, Community is Knowledge! in (KA)2. I guess that should be one of the first papers on Web2.0, in 1998 :-)

Enjoy!

Technology Evangelist?

2007-02-06T17:01:00.000+01:00

One of my principal activities these days is to bring Semantic Technology to markets and society in order to improve our (for the moment, professional) lives. This involves, among others, understanding of technology and market mechanisms, business insight and business development, and knowledge of processes related to innovation. Many times I find myself talking to people trying to convince them about the great things, the major leap forward, that this new technology can bring us. I am convinced myself; for sure. I often use the term: “to evangelize”, in analogy to the evangelists of the Bible.

Recently I found out that this is actually a know position in organizations, and I found a study that analyzes several important technology evangelists of Silicon Valley (I think Apple appointed the first one). The study can be found here, and I found the reference at the blog “How to Change the World” of Guy Kawasaki, quite an interesting and entertaining blog (e.g. check out the video on “The Art of the Start”).

The abstract of the study is as follows (taken from http://www.growthresourcesinc.com/TechEvan.pdf):

"The purpose of this study was to gain a clearer understanding of the relatively new phenomenon known as the "technology evangelist." By our exploration, we aim to help readers improve their management functions, and to understand how best to integrate “evangelists” within their organizations.

In order to do so, we analyzed the roles of those who hold this position and leadership styles. Our research included surveying and interviewing 29 technical evangelists worldwide from a variety of cultures and organizations.

Some general tendencies regarding the role did, indeed, emerge. However, we also discovered variable character, or personality, patterns among the participants. Therefore, we proceeded to examine the gap, between the role of the technology evangelist and the subject’s personal character.

We contrasted individual competencies with these character patterns, and created a grid to analyze their qualities of leadership. This paper includes our recommendations for recruiting, integrating, developing and managing the technology evangelists."

Enjoy!

1st European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC2007) initiates a new conference series in Semantic technologies in Europe

2007-01-20T22:49:00.000+01:00

1st European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC2007) initiates a new conference series in Semantic technologies in Europe

The European Semantic Technologies Conference aims to be the European platform for bringing together those who use Semantic Technologies in their business, those who implement Semantic Solutions and those who build semantically-enabled products. So far, existing events around Semantic Technologies have been mostly academically oriented. With the technology becoming more mature and deployed, the need for a more industrial and commercially oriented event is evident.

The following texts come from a press release and the Call for Presentations of ESTC 2007. Full press release can be found here.

ESTC2007 is a new European meeting place for users, practitioners, developers and researchers to discuss the applicability and commercialization of semantic technologies for enterprises and public organizations. ESTC also enables delegates to understand Semantic Technologies and their potential and how to exploit these technologies in their organizations.

The conference will be held in Hofburg Redouten Säle, Vienna, Austria, May 31 – June 1, 2007 and will feature case study and practical experience presentations, workshops and tutorials, invited talks and an industrial exhibition.

Conference chairman Dr John Davies, Head of BT’s Next Generation Web unit, said “I am very pleased to be able to announce the initiation of this conference series. Given the increasing maturity of semantic technology, the time is right to complement more technical and academic conferences in this area with an annual European conference focusing on deployment and the commercial benefits semantic technology can deliver.”

The first ESTC is looking for contributions of:

Businesses and public organizations describing their practical experience (case studies) in using Semantic Technologies (the problem, the solution, initial expectations, the project, results, cost/benefit)
Vendor reports on semantically-enabled products and solutions
Analyst reports on the current market situation for Semantic Technologies

In particular, we invite the submission of case studies, reports and practical experience papers.

The full CFP can be found here.

The Program Chair is advised by a Program Advisory Board, which consists of a mixture of industrial people, research analysts, venture capitalists, and renowned academics with an interest in applied research.

But how does a VC think about the Semantic Web?

2007-01-16T15:01:00.000+01:00

A few days ago, someone sent me a pointer to a presentation given by one of the investors in Radar Networks, Peter Rip of Crosslink Capital, entitled: "Semantic Web, What Does It All Mean for You?" (Radar Networks was mentioned in the article "Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense, John Markoff, New York Times: November 12, 2006 ", see my post of Jan 1, 2007).

I was surprised by the simplicity and clearness of this presentation concerning its relation to Web2.0. Basically, he views Web2.0 as a "poor man´s Semantic Web". Bringing the Web to its full potential requires the Semantic Web. Check it yourself here. The presentation is posted on this blog.

The Value of Semantic Web Services for Business and Society

2007-01-10T09:36:00.000+01:00

In an earlier post, I wrote about the DIP project and mentioned there: "There is also a movie available explaining the value of the project in terms of three particular sectors, e-government, telco, and e-banking." The movie has now been finished and released and can be watched in this blog, as well as on the DIP home page.

Again, DIP has been a very ambitious, yet successful project which potential for major impact in society and businesses. In a few months, I hope to be able to be a bit more precise about some of those business opportunities.

If the movie doesn´t show, please click here to view it on the KMI website.

Some quotes from the Final Review Report:

"... the work that has been carried out by the DIP consortium and the way in which the consortium has carried out that work. The DIP partners have ensured that the project has become a flagship project."

"Overall, DIP has been a paragon of collaborative research. "

"The reviewers would be pleased if DIP was drawn on by the CEC as an exemplar project, in order to demonstrate the increased value of carrying out international collaborative research."

"Technically the project has produced excellent results "

Enjoy!

Semantic Web, Web2.0, Web3.0 …

2007-01-01T17:30:00.000+01:00

The past few months I have been puzzled with the message of some publications regarding the Semantic Web (or better “Semantic Technologies”), Web2.0, Web3.0, and in particular with interpreting what this means for uptake of Semantic Technologies in the market.

The publications in question are:

Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense, John Markoff, New York Times: November 12, 2006 (free registration required to access NYT)

Hype Cycle for Web Technologies, 2006, publication date: 7 July 2006 (not freely available)

Several publications related to the success of Web2.0 in 2006 (blogs, youtube, wikipedia, flickr, etc.).

At first sight, it seems that Web2.0 is receiving the media attention that previously was given to the Semantic Web. In the figure below, which is generated with Google Trends, the blue line represents the Semantic Web and the red line Web2.0. The top part refers to web pages mentioning the terms; the bottom part refers to news appearance.

In the 2006 edition of Gartner’s Hype Curve, the Public Semantic Web is at the through of disillusionment and is estimated to take between 5 and 10 years to reach the plateau of productivity. Web2.0 and the Corporate Semantic Web, on the other hand, are at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, the former reaching its plateau in an estimated 2-5 years, and the latter 5-10 years.

One reason for these phenomena is that Semantic Technologies build up an infrastructure on top of which the web can grow to its full potential, whereas Web2.0 is related to communities of final users (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/, http://www.wikipedia.org/). One consequence of this is that Web2.0 is much more visible than Semantic Technologies, and thus it is much easier to attract attention of a large audience. Semantic Technologies is supposed to create an (invisible) infrastructure, whereas Web2.0 creates highly visible applications for final users using the existing web, but with a significantly improved user interface (thanks to AJAX). This would also explain why there is disappointment with the Public Semantic Web (the large public hasn’t seen anything yet); whereas the Corporate Semantic Web is still peaking. Businesses see a huge benefit of, for example, better access to important corporate information in unstructured documents (Mike Lynch, CEO and Founder of Autonomy, estimates that 80% of corporate information is hidden in unstructured documents). Businesses are not interested in final user applications, but in promising technology that can help them to better manage their information.
For me, one of the most striking achievements of Web2.0 is its capacity to involve large active user communities. Indeed, this has been a (happy) surprise. At the beginning of the Semantic Web effort, many of us were convinced that it would never be possible to annotate web content with (semantic) tags through human effort. Therefore, much research effort was dedicated to automatically generating annotations using advanced Natural Language Processing techniques. Web2.0 initiatives have shown this assumption to be false; it is possible to tag large amounts of multimedia and text documents by communities of people.

Recently the term Web3.0 is getting popular, which refers –freely interpreted- to the combination of Web2.0 and the Semantic Web.

My take on this is that we will hear much from Semantic Technologies in the context of corporations. The Public Semantic Web will regain strength in combination with Web2.0 aspects, strengthening the notion of Web3.0.

Happy 2007!

So much compelling technology and all freely available under LGPL .

2006-11-24T00:36:00.000+01:00

On November 16-17, 2006 the final review of the SEKT project took place in BT´s installations in Ipswich, UK. SEKT is three years European IST project (running from Jan 2004 to Dec 2006) aimed at improving Knowledge Management using Semantic Technologies. The project was organised in several technology work packages (with the aim to create innovative and cutting edge technology), and three application (case study) work packages (to provide real life requirements and to provide a testbed). The three applications are related to

A large Digital Library
Decision support for (Spanish) Judges on duty
Knowledge management for an IT consultancy company

The technology developed can be divided in different groups

Text mining, ontology learning, clustering components to structure "hidden" information
Natural language processing components to extract semantic information from unstructured content
Ontology engineering software (editing, mapping and versioning)
Components for automatic annotation
An integration platform compliant with industry standards

Specific effort has been dedicated to scalability and methodological aspects of semantic solutions.

The SEKT project has produced an impressive list of software components that -if configured rightly- can solve many existing knowledge management problems. The good thing is that most software is freely available under the LGPL license.

So, any company (and of course university) with technological IT skills, can simply go to www.sekt-project.com and download the components of interest, and plug and play prototypes.

In addition, the project has produced a training website, with movie material to get quickly up to speed with Semantic Technologies. This includes movies taken from SEKT people giving tutorials and screen cams from the software and applications. There is also a website especially aimed at decision makers and IT managers.

The review went very well. The EC, the reviewers and the project partners were very satisfied. To be continued ...?

FP7, a happy surprise

2006-11-22T22:54:00.000+01:00

As you’ve read before in this blog, I am attending the IST Conference in Helsinki. During the session on Intelligent Content and Semantics, Stefano Bertolo gave a practical presentation on FP7 proposals. The happy surprise concerns the so-called STR-D projects (Specifically Targeted Research Projects – Demonstration) geared towards field experimentation (“use cases”).

Projects of this kind are (quoting from Bertolo, full presentation here):

centred around existing, promising but untried technologies
designed to go one step forward towards

packaging, configuring … and testing

assess suitability & viability

functionality
performance
usability (hide technical complexity!

within a well defined domain / user context
rigorous evaluation plans & metrics
active user involvement & feedback
adequate documentation of results (positive/negative)

Throughout my postings in this blog so-far you may have read some frustration about the difficulty in closing the gap between R&D results and the market. To me it seems that these STR-D projects could play a promising role in filling this gap. It allows, for example, to take results of existing R&D projects (e.g. the SEKT project), and develop them a step further into direction of the market. This form of project seems to acknowledge that it is hard and expensive (and involving high technology risk) to bring R&D results to the market, and therefore I applaud it.

Innovation Funnels and Impact Sprays

2006-11-19T22:41:00.000+01:00

On Nov. 14, 2006 the second annual review of the OntoGrid project took place in Brussels. The goal of the OntoGrid project is to design an architecture for the Semantic Grid; the long hoped for combination of Grid and Semantic Web. The idea is to add semantic metadata to Grid resources (so-called “semantic bindings”) such that Grid resources can be reasoned about, thereby paving the way for automatic discovery, selection and combination of Grid resources. In this sense the Semantic Grid and Semantic Web Services have several things in common (see my posting on the DIP project)

Many of the projects I am involved in are about developing and applying research results and technology to real life settings. That is, there is an important focus on “exploitation plans” of the research results, with the aim of commercial uptake in the market. In the OntoGrid project that is not the case. OntoGrid is a STRP (a Specific Targeted Research Project) whose focus is on research rather than on potential commercial exploitation of the project results.

Apart from mentioning that the review went very well; both the reviewers and the Commission were very happy with the project (you can read all about the project at the website www.ontogrid.net), we found an interesting distinction between research projects focused on commercial exploitation of the results, and research projects focusing on impact on the research communities. This difference is expressed in the Innovation Funnel versus the “Impact Spray” (coined by Carole Goble).

As I wrote in IEEE Intelligent System (AI’s Future: Innovating in Business and Society, May/June issue, 2006, pp 72-73), The innovation funnel models how ideas become products. Having ideas is easy, turning them into concrete proposals is a bit more difficult, transforming that into a working prototype is much harder, and commercializing the software is a completely different story. Few ideas make it to commercialization and end up in a new product, service, or even company. A consequence of the innovation funnel is that as you move from idea to results, you need increasingly more investment. Having an idea is cheap; commercializing a software product or service might involve millions of dollars. The Innovation Funnel applied to OntoGrid is illustrated in the figure below. There are quite a few ideas and proposals for technology and/or components, but only a few will make it in the end to the mainstream market (may take easily 5 years, I estimate).

The impact spray is exactly the opposite. One starts with one main idea (Semantic Grid in this case), which leads to several proposals, which each may lead to several prototypes, etc. As the project creates more impact, and the research community takes up the individual results and starts using it, it quickly spreads out like a spray. Maybe s omething like the selfish memes of Richard Dawkins (Richard Dawkins, ``The Selfish Gene'', Oxford University Press, 1976). The figure below shows to Impact Spray applied to OntoGrid current state (© Carole Goble, as far as I know).

The 2006 edition of the IST Conference, Nov. 22, Helsinki

2006-11-15T18:39:00.000+01:00

Next week, I will give two presentations at the IST conference about applications using Semantic Technology in enterprises and public organisations. One presentation is a general one discussing the market (estimated size, drivers, and inhabitants) for Semantic Technology, several applications (both for corporate and public Semantic Web), and some barriers this type of technology is likely to encounter. The presentation can be downloaded here.

Date, time and place: Intelligent Content and Semantics, 22 November 2006, 14:00-15:30, The Helsinki Fair Centre, room Lappeenranta

The other presentation discusses a semantic application for Spanish judges, and in particular recent judges. In order to become a judge in Spain, one has to pass a public exam held as a competition. Only the top performers are invited to become judge. Once accepted, the recent judge gets all responsibilities, but has still little practical knowledge. The system we are building provides a solution for this problem in the form of an intelligent FAQ system. We built a high-quality corpus of about 1000 frequently asked question-answer pairs, collected and maintained, based on interviews with more than 400 judges. The judges can query the system in natural language (e.g. "I have given an injunction of protection and the woman is asking me for a withdrawal of the measure. Should I withdraw it?"), and get as result a list of related question answer pairs. In addition, it provides a list of documents with related sentences to the answer.

The novelty of the system is they way in which relevant question-answer pairs are retrieved, namely based on domain semantics, represented in ontologies. We can say that –to some extent- the system “understands” the user query, and based on this understanding, provides relevant results. The presentation can be here.
The session is called: Building Semantic Knowledge Applications and the program is:

11.00 – 11.05 Introduction and overview
Dr. John Davies
11.05 – 11.15 A Semantic Application for Spanish Judges
Dr. V. Richard Benjamins
11.15 – 11.25 Large-scale semantic web applications
Professor Enrico Motta
11.25 – 11.35 A case study in semantic web services
DIP project representative
11.35 – 11.55 Providing Intelligent Content by Using Web Semantics and Web Mining
Dr. Pinar Senkul, Dr. Marko Grobelnik, Professor Josiane Mothe
11.45 – 11.55 The Role of Language - Extending the Semantic Web towards Web Pragmatics
Professor Kurt Englmeier
11.55 – 12.10 Cost estimation for ontology engineering
Prof. Rudi Studer
12.10 – 12.30 Panel discussion
Facilitated by Dr John Davies

Enjoy!

Semantic Web and Web2.0

2006-11-08T17:11:00.000+01:00

Since some time, I am asking myself the question “what does Web2.0 mean for a company like iSOCO”, which is currently focusing on bringing Semantic Web technology to the market. Both technologies are expected to have high impact on businesses and society. But what is their relation? Are they complementary or competitors for achieving the same dream? When one says “Semantic Web”, one says “ontologies”; formal web representations of knowledge of a particular domain. When saying “Web2.0”, one says “communities”, “services” and much more (see http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html).

In my view, they are complementary, both helping to bring the web to its full potential for society and businesses. Rather than expressing this in text, I tried to add relevant tags (for Semantic Web and Web2.0) to all our Semantic Web applications we have been built over the past few years. The presentation can be downloaded here. Enjoy! It also includes a small introduction to iSOCO, but you can safely skip that.

Final review DIP project

2006-10-27T11:34:00.000+02:00

This week we celebrated the final review of the DIP project (http://dip.semanticweb.org/), which stands for Data, Information, and Process Integration with Semantic Web Services. DIP is a 16 MEuro, 3 year project partially funded by the European Commission, involving about 20 top class industrial and academic partners, including SAP, BT, iSOCO, Unicorn (IBM), Hanival, OU, EPFL, FZI, etc.). DIP finishes on December 31, 2006.

During the final review of two days, 40 members of the consortium presented the results to three external experts hired by the EC, and to the EC Project Officer. Wonderful new technology has been developed that has the potential to change businesses in the future. In the context of this blog, I am especially interested in what happens with all this technology once the project has finished. Of the two day review, almost half a day was dedicated to exploitation plans, which in itself is a positive exception. Exploitation plans lay out the realistic intentions of the consortium to use (apply, commercialize) project results beyond the scope of the project.

The highlights of the exploitation session included:

Many different kind of commercial exploitation plans
Firm commitment to create a new company
Acquisition of DIP partner by large IT company
Vertical exploitation of case studies in particular sectors
Horizontal exploitation through acquisition of DIP partner
Joint exploitation plans for large organizations and SMEs
All licensing for core technology is Open Source
Academic exploitation through take up in many recent R&D projects
Strong influence on standards in two leading standards bodies

In three or five years we will see how many of the exploitation plans have become reality.

Needless to say, that the review was a big success (flagship project, an example).

There is also a movie available explaining the value of the project in terms of three particular sectors, e-government, telco, and e-banking. I will make the movie later available on this blog.

TinyURL

2006-10-04T22:28:00.000+02:00

Innovation is sometimes defined as “the introduction of something new and useful”. A very simple example of such innovation is http://tinyurl.com. It changes long URLs into short ones. How often have you received en email with a URL (often to a dynamically generated webpage from a database) of several lines that your mail client has broken into parts that you need to copy and paste manually into your browser? Too often? Tinyurl solves this problem completely by turning your long URL (before sending it by email) into a short one. It works, it is simple, and free. That is innovation!

Budget for Writing Exploitation Plans in R&D Projects

2006-10-03T16:48:00.000+02:00

Needless to say that the IST program of the European Commission is enormously stimulating the R&D activities in European universities and companies. But what about real innovation based on this research?

As mentioned previously, and as I will explain in later writings, the commercial exploitation of R&D results is not easy. It starts with designing good and realistic exploitation plans. A fully fledged exploitation plan is something like a business plan that you can present to top management or VCs with the objective to raise money for starting a new business.

Even though the European Commission (EC) is keen on commercialising technology and tools originated in European IST research projects, their main objective is to investigate and develop new technology, not to innovate in businesses and society. EU research projects thus focus on exploitation plans, while other programs such as eTen or eContent Plus focus more on respectively commercialisation and applications. However, the largest share of public funding goes to IST research projects.

This creates a situation where

The EC is very keen on commercial exploitation plans of consortia
The research projects are not the optimal instrument to generate realistic, well founded exploitation plans (for several reasons, as I will explain in later writings).

Below you can see an illustrative table with some of the projects I have participated (participate) in along with the relation between effort dedicated to R&D, and effort reserved for dissemination and exploitation plans. Notice that most of the projects are in the Semantic Web area.

On average, only 8 percent of the effort is devoted to dissemination exploitation, so even less is dedicated to writing exploitation plans. We have to take into account that those efforts are assigned by the consortia themselves, not by the EC. Although the percentage is low (with the exception of the last two projects, Super and Neon), the actual efforts in person months are not so low. E.g. 36 person months is equivalent to three persons working full time during one year on a particular topic. Yet, it seems very hard for consortia to come up with realistic exploitation plans that –after project termination- give rise to commercial exploitation. Several reasons come to my mind.

The interest of people participating in research projects is research, not marketing.
Exploitation is considered as a requirement imposed by the EC at the time of proposal submission and contract negotiation, and therefore is added artificially.
Researchers are good at research, not necessarily at writing business plans.
Research projects are long term (3-4 years), whereas commercial opportunities are planned on a shorter time scale.

I can continue enumerating many more reasons. I will elaborate on some of them later on, and also provide some ideas on how to improve the commercial exploitation of research results. However, this is mainly a high-level political issue to “make the EU the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world.”

Keep innovating!

Innovation and European R&D (IST) projects

2006-10-02T15:52:00.000+02:00

In the past years (FP4, 5, 6), I have extensively participated in European IST Research projects. More and more I have seen a shift of the European Commission from basic research to commercial exploitation. The “Exploitation Plans” of the consortium are one of the most important topics during the final reviews. An exploitation plan lays out the plans of the consortium (members) of how to commercially exploit the R&D results obtained during the project. Take into account that, for private organizations, EU projects are co-financed between the EU and the private organization. Some return on investment would not be so strange …

How often do R&D results of European Projects hit the market successfully? Actually, I do not have figures or statistics on this, but would be very interested (anybody has an idea? Please let me know). It is my impression –both as researcher and as EC reviewer and evaluator- that there are very few R&D results that make it successfully to the market. And this is a pity. In the following writings I will analyse why –in my experience- this is the case, talking about factors such as:
• The relative budget allocation to “exploitation” of R&D results,
• The composition of consortia (people organizations),
• The ambition of proposals (the sky is the limit) versus the reality at project end,
• The speed at which things happen in large R&D projects versus the rapid changes in the market and technology landscape,
• The innovation funnel,
• The technology adoption lifecycle,
• Gartner’s Hype curves,
• European university education on creating companies,
• European entrepreneurial culture and mentality,
• Etc.

The EC goal (Lisbon Council) is/was to make Europe the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. That only can/could happen if innovation happens at a very rapid pace, bringing new technology to the market in record times. That is still an important goal for Europe, and something I feel as a personal mission related to Semantic Web technology. But it is very hard; success is more an exception than a rule.

Stay tuned.

First posting: introduction

2006-09-04T17:12:00.000+02:00

I am director of Innovation and Research & Development, and Board Member at Intelligent Software Components, S.A. (iSOCO) It is our mission to help organizations innovate in their businesses using advanced ICT. In the network economy, it is increasingly important to delegate knowledge-intensive tasks to software.

Dr. Richard Benjamins' Blog

A happy country

À Dutch in Spain

Real Customer Insight?

Dinner Speech at ICAIL 2009

Interview for German TV, Mobile World Congress

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year

R&D in Spain

Hybrid Worlds

The Ambidextrous Organization

Google's Innovation Machine

Business in Bottom of Pyramid Countries?

Patents in Spain

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year

Trip to South Korea

Beyond the (current) web

Everybody can be a journalist and publisher (in realtime)

Use and Abuse of Internet

Monitoring for Technological Strategy

Technological Strategy 2.0

Change of focus

A typical story on Innovation: Europe versus US

Change

Invited talks of ESTC 2007, Vienna

W3C SWEO Publishes Case Studies

1st European Semantic Technology Conference

New Gartner Report on Semantic Technologies

Free Office to PDF converter

EC publishes statistics of FP7, ICT, Call1 Submissions

The Future of Search Engines (outgoing links in Spanish)

Norwegian Semantic Days 2007

BusinessWeek about the Semantic Web

A New Generation Search Engines

The Impact of "IT on demand"

Searching content of images

The Web of Data

Usability and Innovations

Web2.0 to the extreme

Semantic Technology Annual Conference 2007 in Korea

관련 단기 강좌

The first pages of the Semantic Web? (1998), and Web2.0?

Technology Evangelist?

1st European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC2007) initiates a new conference series in Semantic technologies in Europe

But how does a VC think about the Semantic Web?

The Value of Semantic Web Services for Business and Society

Semantic Web, Web2.0, Web3.0 …

So much compelling technology and all freely available under LGPL .

FP7, a happy surprise

Innovation Funnels and Impact Sprays

The 2006 edition of the IST Conference, Nov. 22, Helsinki

Semantic Web and Web2.0

Final review DIP project

TinyURL

Budget for Writing Exploitation Plans in R&D Projects

Innovation and European R&D (IST) projects

First posting: introduction