New Gartner Report on Semantic Technologies

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.