At this year’s Innotribe at Sibos (25-29 Oct 2010), we have a whole track on “Smart Data” aka “Semantic Web”.
We decided to call it Smart Data is – at least in our industry – the words “semantic web” have ironically little meaning.
I am a big believer of Semantic Web, and always on the look for good education material to help me explain what it is and why it is important.
Here is a video made by Cisco, by their IBSG group (Internet Business Solutions Group). I had the pleasure of recently working with IBSG folks, and I can tell you these guys are NOT the router guys. They are very knowledgeable. I also recently discovered they had a whole practice on digital federated identity and now this one on semantic web.
Some highlights in this video:
Starting (!) from the iPhone App Siri (Siri was acquired by Apple in April 2010), to WiseWindow, the video gives you some teasers on what this technology can do for you, and then moves into a really good and quick tutorial on the standards underpinning semantic web.
The Siri application is about understanding natural language and giving intentional feedback and information back to the user. Watch the detailed video above.
WiseWindows looks into
- assessing your competitive position
- most desired features, discovering patterns in conversations and buzz, influencers, etc
- market sentiment
The speaker also emphasizes the importance of onthologies. Highly relevant in a SWIFT Standards context. With the ISO20022 Standards, SWIFT is already at the core of THE semantic onthology for the financial industry. Fore Semantic web, an untapped goldmine for the emerging future of SWIFT.
The ability to understand natural language and reason about data could improve business intelligence for financial services. In essence, today SWIFT already tags semantically the fields of the standard SWIFT messages. Tomorrow – with our onthology – we could tag ANY information, including non-structured information hidden in PDF’s or Word documents, overlay that information with existing other structured data sources, and offer pattern recognition services leading to deeper intelligence about our and our customers’ data.
What I want to make clear is that this is not only related to the social web. On the contrary.
It’s about data-integration within and across organizations.
Was that not the purpose of EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) ? The difference is that the above systems are often messaging based: sending (standardized) structured messages from one system to another.
I believe that we are witnessing a paradigm shift
from “sending messages from A to B”
to “publishing linked data”
into centralized or distributed data repositories.
From “sending and storing messages”
to “publishing and subscribing
to linked-data repositories”
The key challenge in all this is to be able to (automatically) tag data semantically. Who else than SWIFT would be better placed to be that semantic quality anchor for the financial industry ?
The video closes with 5 messages for our leaders:
- Look for value both inside and outside your core by tapping also into public data sources
- Experiment and Scale success. Your innovation team should do proof-of-concepts on this, even if this is not yet foreseen in your product roadmaps
- Build semantic skillsets as these are competitive differentiators
- Lay the foundation for semantical enablement of unstructured data, like PDF’s, but also images, audio and video sources
- Look now at what semantics can do to transform business
I have seen recently from Cisco how they do live-streaming-and-tagging of video for their internal portal. Maybe we should invite somebody from the Cisco IBSG-team to our Smart Data stream at Sibos ?
BTW: Guido Jouret from Cisco will speak at Innotribe at Sibos in the Open Innovation Best Practices session on Thursday 28 Oct 2010. Guido Jouret is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Cisco’s Emerging Markets Technology Group (EMTG), which is responsible for incubating Cisco’s future billion-dollar businesses.
Petervan Studios 
This will take me all weekend to digest and still be over my semantic head.
But I would say that the paradigm shift is from “I search the web for xyz” to Siri (or Cisco’s amazing virtual nurse. Paula?) do xyz for me.”