Transcript Marketing the Semantic Web Crossing the Technology Chasm

Promoting the Semantic Web
Crossing the Technology Chasm
Date: April 28, 2006
Version 0.1
Dan McCreary
President
Dan McCreary & Associates
(952) 931-9198
BY:
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Overview
• Where are Semantic Web standards today?
– Review the standards stack
– Semantic Web SWOT
• Where do we want to be?
– A mainstream standard (used by more that just innovator
and early adopters)
– Have high impact on the economics of data sharing
• What is the Technology Standards Chasm?
• The Linking Challenge
• Strategies for Crossing the Chasm
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Why This Presentation
• After discussions with
–
–
–
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Jim Heldler – “Linking is Power”
Ora Lassila - Nokia
Tony Shaw – Wilshire Conference
Eric Miller – W3C – Semantic Web Education
and Outreach
• What can we do to promote semantic web
standards?
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The Agent Vision
The Semantic Web will bring structure to the
meaningful content of Web pages, creating an
environment where software agents roaming
from page to page can readily carry out
sophisticated tasks for users.
Agent
Agent
Agent
Agent
Agent
The Semantic Web
A new form of Web content that is meaningful to
computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities
By Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila
Scientific American
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Semantic Web Standards Stack
Trusted Semantic Web
Source: Tim Berners-Lee www.w3c.org
Proof
Ontology (OWL)
Encryption
Rules/Query
Signature
Logic
RDF Model & Syntax
XML Query
XML
URI/IRI
XML Schema
Namespaces
Unicode
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/Presentations/SemanticWeb/34.html
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Semantic Web Today
• Search of Google for “ontology filetype:owl”
• Returns about 14,000 files from:
–
–
–
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.edu – lots of academic research projects
.org – some standards bodies
.gov – some government standards
.com – very few commercial companies publish their
metadata in .owl format
• Extremely few inter-ontology links
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Sample SWOT Analysis for Semantic Web
Today:
Strengths
• W3C has an excellent reputation for creating
useful standards (HTML, XML, XML Schema
etc)
• Few alternative technologies with same
breath and ambition
• Widespread acceptance in academic
institutions worldwide
Future:
Opportunities
• IT departments spend billions each year on
integration
• Automated metadata discovery could become
cost-effective
• Automated integration requires ontologies
• Business Intelligence/Analytics/Data
Warehouse require precise semantics
• Business Rule engines need precise
semantics
• SOA need precise semantics
Weaknesses
• Proof, logic and trust layers still in research
and development stage
• Few cost-effective tools for many areas
• RDF perceived as too complex or
conflicting with XML (RSS example)
• Perception that web sites need to be
published in both human and machine
readable versions doubling costs
• Few published case studies with
documented ROI
Threats
• Many incompatible mini standards
• Complexity
• Vendor specific solutions
• Complex XML structures (XLink, XPath)
• Confusion with other standards (XMI,
CWM, ISO-11179)
• One big wikipedia takes over the entire
world wide web and adds semantic features
• Incompatible and constantly changing
Folksonomies
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Today the Semantic Web
• Is being used by innovators and early
adopters
• Is not yet a “mainstream” technology
• Has yet to pick up the momentum in the
corporate world to be a viable long-term
standard
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Technology Standard Waves
??
XHTML
XML
URI/HTML
Technology standards come in “waves” and are built on other standards
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Technology Adoption Cycles
The
Chasm
Geoffrey Moore
Innovators
Early
Majority
Early
Adopters
Late
Majority
Laggards
Technologies that fail to cross the chasm fail to reach critical mass.
Source: “Crossing the Chasm”
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Three Step Strategy
1. Identify where you customers are on the
technology adoption cycle
2. Tailor your marketing strategy to needs
the needs of that section of the
marketplace
3. Build marketing materials that
specifically target the needs of your
customer
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Innovators
• First group to use a new technology
• Pure technologists – sometime without
clear business requirement
• Aggressively pursue new ways of solving business problems
• Want to know how things work – they will figure out how to
apply a technology to their business problems
• Tend to be very high maintenance, they need a lot of
handholding
• Are looked to from other buyers for recommendations
• Less than 2% of buyers
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Early Adopters
• Usually the second group to use a new
technology
• Wait till the innovators have recommended a
product
• Don’t need full ROI analysis but…
• Don’t want to be the first to use something
but will be aggressive once
• Use technology differentiation for
competitive advantage in the marketplace
(attract the “uber-geeks” to work in their IT
departments)
• Approximately 15% of buyers
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Early Majority
• Third group to use a new technology
• Wait till the innovators and early
adopters have recommended a
product within their industry
• Buy based on case studies of other
users in similar industries
• Like to see ROI analysis but don’t
require it
• Most profitable segment of the
marketplace
• Approximately 1/3 of buyers
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Late Majority
• Fourth group to use a new
technology
• Wait for industry standards to be
available and being used by more
than half of the peers in their
industry
• Wait till rock-solid ROI is available
and clearly documented
• They check references carefully and
are very price conscious
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Laggards
• Last group to use a new technology
• Strong dislike for new technology
and change
• Will only purchase a new technology
when buried deep within a total
solution
• Sometimes least profitable to market
to since the technology has been
integrated and commoditized
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The Chasm
• The place where most standards
fail (over 85%)
• Primary Reasons:
– A technology is too hard to use
– To hard to explain the business
benefits of a technology
– Really does not address a
significant enough business
problem to justify the change
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Expected Payout
Change and Payout
Approve
Change
Approver
Position
Withhold
Approval
Degree of change
• People will make not make changes
if they do not perceive there is a
benefit to them individually
(payout)
• Individual will approve small
changes if they see a small benefit
• They will make large changes only
if they see a large payouts for
themselves
• You must either convince approvers
that the change is small or the
payout is large
Source: Managerial Economics and Organizational Architecture 3rd Edition p. 556
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The Chasm
• The place where most standards fail (over
85%)
• Primary Reasons:
– The new technology is too complex to use
– It is too hard to explain the business benefits
of a technology to non-technical decision
makers
– It does not address a significant enough
business problem to justify the change
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Crossing The Chasm
Early
Majority
Early
Adopters
• Standard cross the chasm by vertical
industry
• Early majority buyers want references
from within their industry
• But usually early adopters don’t want to
share their success stories
• Getting the first “reference accounts” in
a specific vertical industry is the critical
factor
• Case studies must be carefully analyzed
to ensure that the customers have the
same motivation
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Getting References
• Use of “Case Study” Marketing
• Sometime corporate identify can be obscured (a
large Midwest bank), but this tends to mitigate the
impact of a case study
• Some purchasers what to know what specific peer
companies are using a new technology
• Many companies refuse to be considered for a
case study since they perceive their technology
strategy is part of their competitive advantage.
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Key Elements of a Case Study
1. Organization Description – the reader looks
for: “Is this organization similar to mine?”
2. Business Challenge – the reader verifies: “Is
this problem similar to my problem?”
3. Solution – “Can we be expected to get similar
results”
4. Results – “What types of quantifiable results
did the users get? Could we get the same
results?”
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Selling Incremental Change
• Instead of a “big bang” or “forklift
upgrade”, can you sell a smaller set of lowrisk changes?
• Example: Microformats
• How will web publishing tools need to
change?
• How will this benefit the Publisher
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Ontologies are Islands of Understanding
• An individual OWL file or internal
metadata registry without links to
other ontologies is a self-contained
“island” of understanding
• Concepts and properties are
internally linked and consistent with
each other but agents can not
understand relationships of concepts
to other ontologies
• Fine for internal data warehouses and
internal OLTP systems
• Does not take advantage of the
growing knowledge base of the
machine understandable web
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Inter-ontology Links are Bridges
• RDF statements in separate
ontologies can be expressed as
URIs that are the identical
• OWL supports sameAs,
equivalentClass and
equivalentProperty
statements to create bridges
between ontologies
• Links allows agents to traverse
ontologies and perform
searches on disparate systems
even if our local ontology does
not have the data
• “Linking is Power” applies to
Google page ranks and agent
interoperability
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Bridge/Link Funding
Agent
Web
page
• What if there are two
ontologies that have
overlapping conceptual
domains?
• What if both source systems
want to access each others
data?
• Who pays for the links?
• Where are the links stored?
• What about change control?
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Who Pays for the Bridges?
database
Agent
Web
page
•
•
What is the economic motivation for building a bridge?
Who benefits from building a bridge?
–
–
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•
•
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The agent seeking data?
The data owners?
The community as a whole?
Where are inter-ontology links stored?
Will there be the standards?
Where are the bridges stored?
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Hub and Spokes
• Goal: create semantic linking to a few metadata
standard, not many standards
Mapping from one to many metadata
registry to N other metadata registries:
The O(N2) problem
Mapping to one metadata registry
The O(N) problem
(aka ESB-Enterprise Service Bus)
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Large and Upper Ontologies
• What is the role of large or upper ontologies in the
process?
• Can they be used as linking hubs?
• What is the role of small ontologies such as
Dublin Core?
• How would users publish their semantic links to
these central ontologies?
• Can translation services be created from these
standards?
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The Tornado
• When you are “inside the early
majority”
• Demand rises rapidly and
outstrips supply of consultants
and training
• Lack of skilled workers and
training
• Who will provide these
people/processes to convince
decision makers that they can:
• Can hire cost-effective
contractors
• Get their staff trained?
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Branding/Site Certification
• Should we promote some type of
certification for resources (web sites)?
• What would be the logo? What would
it imply? Can an agent just look up the
definitions of all the data elements on a
page?
Source: www.pmi.org Annual Report
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Certification
• Should we promote some type of
certification for people?
• What would the scope of these skills or web
sites be?
• How would we certify individuals?
– Proctored exams?
– Knowledge bases?
• Example: The Project Management Institute
has certified over 100,000 individuals and
has over $53M in revenue in 2004
• What conflict of interest would arise?
• Should we promote cost-effective on-line
learning?
Source: www.pmi.org Annual Report
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Example: Moodle Open Source Learning Mgmt. System
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Where are Big Dollars Being Spent?
• Some analysts indicates that 50% of IT
dollars go towards integration issues
• Some analysts say that 75% of integration
issues are due to poor semantics
• What is the size of the market for
“automated semantic integration”?
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Metadata Discovery
• Tools that “scan” data sources and create
new ontologies or mappings to existing
ontologies
Relational Database
Metadata Registry
Data Source Mappings
Corporate Ontology
Examples: Silver Creek Systems
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Vendors Partnerships
•
•
Can we encourage hard-core ontology developers to publish their work in OWL
format?
Database vendors
– What vendors are doing RDF support?
– What vendors currently promote OWL publishing?
– How can we recognize them?
•
Application development vendors
– SOA – Can SOA vendors use the semantic web stack?
– Can Web Service development tools export to OWL format?
•
XML Appliance/Integration/Security vendors
– Can they automate integration using OWL standards
•
•
•
•
•
Metadata registry vendors
Metadata discovery vendors
Tool vendors
Open Source partnerships
Do vendors consider metadata publishing in OWL contrary to their metadata lockin strategy?
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Promote Early Adopters
• Commercial
– Adobe, Cisco, HP, IBM, Nokia, Oracle, Sun,
Vodaphone
• Governments
– US, EU, Japan
• Industries
– Health Care
– Life sciences
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Possible Strategies
• Recognition
– Linking is Power Award – given to organization
that link ontologies together
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References
• Semantic Web Home Page:
– http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
• Semantic Web Education and Outreach Home
Page
– http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/EO/
• Semantic Technologies Conference
– http://www.semantic-conference.com/
• Linking is Power Award
– http://www.danmccreary.com/linking-is-power
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Thank You!
Please contact me for more information:
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Metadata Management Services
Web Services
Service Oriented Architectures
XML Schema Design
Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse
Metadata Registries
Semantic Web
Dan McCreary, President
Dan McCreary & Associates
Metadata Strategy Development
[email protected]
(952) 931-9198
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