December 21, 2007
BrainTrust Query: Is the Semantic Web Merely a Pipe Dream?
By Bill Bittner, President, BWH Consulting
I got to read an issue of Scientific American as I was waiting in the dentist’s office the other day. One of the feature articles is an update on the status of “Web 3.0” also referred to as the “Semantic Web.”
The Semantic Web was first envisioned by the founders of the internet in 2001. By then they realized that there was a necessary piece missing for the internet to reach its full potential. I call Web 1.0 the “Burma Shave Era” – companies and organizations put web pages up along the “electronic superhighway” much like roadway billboards. Web 2.0 heralds in the “Interactive Web” – with the ability to not only access information but also provide feedback and update information stored on the internet. Web 3.0 envisions the day when the data on the internet is organized in such a way that software applications will be able to explore the internet much as humans do today. These applications will use standardized object relationships to make new inferences and recommend novel solutions to problems.
Web 3.0 depends on the development of a taxonomy that defines the possible relationships between objects and an ontology that carries the specific relationships that exist. Retailers have forever struggled with developing product classifications (taxonomies) for all the items they sell. We have merchandising hierarchies, operating department hierarchies, sales tax hierarchies, etc. The industry effort conducted by the Global Commerce Initiative to develop a Global Product Classification is an indication of how difficult it is to get agreement on how items should be organized.
Web 3.0 envisions defining all the objects found on the internet in an ontology of “triples” where each entry consists of three data elements; the subject, verb and predicate. These relationships will be used to make inferences from relationships found on different websites that represent different disciplines. So computers can look at a triple with “Joe” as the subject, “is a” as the verb, and “person” as the predicate. Somewhere else on the internet is a site that tells the computer that “persons”, “are”, “human.” The computer can now infer that Joe is human. Across the internet, a retail website may contain all the fast moving consumer goods and their ingredients. The National Institute of Health computer may identify certain diseases that are exacerbated or suppressed by certain compounds. An application could be written that would explore these two databases and identify the items which should or should not be eaten by sufferers of these diseases.
The internet is a big place and we’re right to be skeptical of the ultimate
vision of Web 3.0. The consensus that is needed across industries will be very
difficult to achieve, just as we have seen within the retail channel for product
classifications. But the potential benefits are huge. If my replenishment or
merchandising applications understand what items are substitutes for one another
and what items share the same price point or meet similar consumer needs, they
can begin to make really meaningful recommendations for assortment planning,
pricing, and inventory allocation. With a clear understanding of the relationship
between various items, computer applications designed for the retail supply
chain could become the true assistants everyone wishes them to be.
Discussion
Questions: How much potential benefit do you see in the concept of a Semantic
Web? Is it hype or reality? Could a smaller scope be implemented for the retail
channel?
[Author’s commentary] I have great hopes for the semantic web. I think there
is actually more potential here than for RFID in the short term. By understanding
item relationships, automation can help decide what items to put on sale and
avoid conflicting promotions. Inventory levels can be monitored and substitutions
made on the fly. Competition analysis becomes much easier.
When I read about it, I wondered why I hadn’t heard more about the semantic web from the technology community. The cynic in me says there’s not enough hardware to sell. The semantic web needs agreement on the taxonomy, a few more disk drives to hold the data relationships, and some application software that uses the data to make decisions. This pales when compared to the hardware revenue from RFID tags, readers and software, but I really believe applications that are sensitive to item relationships and understand the need for additional hotdog rolls when the hotdogs go on sale will make a huge difference in the effectiveness of retail applications. Then again, maybe the technology vendors realize how difficult it is to get all the retail channel players to agree.
BrainTrust
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Discussion Questions
Poll
The idea of Semantic Web for retail is a long long way off. Most retailers can’t even agree on a plan for master Item Data Management, let alone execute on it.
My experience shows that the bigger the retailer, the worse is the state of their item data.
Pipe Dream is a bit of an understatement.
Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, will have great payoffs for marketers. Making it easier to reach the intended audience cuts waste, which cuts cost. And most advertising is wasted. Google is making its search results more appropriate, and there are few businesses growing as quickly as Google.
I think one thing that’s ultimately going to drive the semantic web is natural-language text analysis. Right now the marketing research community is using those tools to interpret words and phrases according to what they mean in the language they’re in, beyond their raw frequency in the data, to turn verbatim comments into data.
At the point that search engines can analyze the text of the web in the same way, so that they can lump together two phrases that mean the same thing but don’t use the same words, we’ll have the verbal semantic web.
Since we know the tools exist in the research community, and that Google has the resources to develop better ones, I’ve gotta believe that natural-language search is a problem people are already well on their way to solving, and that it’s just a matter of time before we see the technologies emerge from universities into companies, or from expensive — which they are now–to cheap–which is always coming in this world of Moore’s Law.
Then, if we can also get smarter about searching images, so that a picture of a duck doesn’t have to be tagged with the keyword ‘duck’ to come up in a search for duck images, we’ll have solved another major obstacle on the way to the semantic web.
It will probably take some technology on the order of SeaDragon from Microsoft (check TED.com for presentation) to even start the image search–but if we can imagine it, someone can code it.
Napoleon Hill and all those positive-thinking types have rarely been wrong: What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Especially if you can throw enough silicon, code and money at it.
I think Bill’s right, this has important implications for a lot of businesses. We should probably stop calling it Web 3.0–for several reasons–but this isn’t likely to be a broad change in the Web. I would think of it more like XML–agreement on a set of standards and ways of describing data relationships that give businesses the tools to start doing some interesting things quite efficiently. Once enough data is organized this way, even broader and more interesting applications become possible, and eventually you will see Web-wide changes in, and frankly, significant changes in everyday life.
BTW, the whole Web 2.0 thing drives me nuts. While the Web did start off as pretty static, as opposed to the big proprietary online services, it quickly took over the community functions from those earlier efforts. In the mid-90s we called them “virtual communities” but *that* was the great promise of the Web. Even efforts like Second Life are the inheritors of the work done in the 90s on avatar-based virtual communities and efforts like VRML to create virtual worlds. It was only after the big “content is king” push from the publishing world, coupled with Yahoo proving you could make money on advertising to an online community, that the one-way, content-driven view of the Web gained prominence in the late 90s and early 00s. “Web 2.0” is just the re-emergence of the original model, based on much better tools. There, I feel better.
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The idea of Semantic Web for retail is a long long way off. Most retailers can’t even agree on a plan for master Item Data Management, let alone execute on it.
My experience shows that the bigger the retailer, the worse is the state of their item data.
Pipe Dream is a bit of an understatement.
Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, will have great payoffs for marketers. Making it easier to reach the intended audience cuts waste, which cuts cost. And most advertising is wasted. Google is making its search results more appropriate, and there are few businesses growing as quickly as Google.
I think one thing that’s ultimately going to drive the semantic web is natural-language text analysis. Right now the marketing research community is using those tools to interpret words and phrases according to what they mean in the language they’re in, beyond their raw frequency in the data, to turn verbatim comments into data.
At the point that search engines can analyze the text of the web in the same way, so that they can lump together two phrases that mean the same thing but don’t use the same words, we’ll have the verbal semantic web.
Since we know the tools exist in the research community, and that Google has the resources to develop better ones, I’ve gotta believe that natural-language search is a problem people are already well on their way to solving, and that it’s just a matter of time before we see the technologies emerge from universities into companies, or from expensive — which they are now–to cheap–which is always coming in this world of Moore’s Law.
Then, if we can also get smarter about searching images, so that a picture of a duck doesn’t have to be tagged with the keyword ‘duck’ to come up in a search for duck images, we’ll have solved another major obstacle on the way to the semantic web.
It will probably take some technology on the order of SeaDragon from Microsoft (check TED.com for presentation) to even start the image search–but if we can imagine it, someone can code it.
Napoleon Hill and all those positive-thinking types have rarely been wrong: What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Especially if you can throw enough silicon, code and money at it.
I think Bill’s right, this has important implications for a lot of businesses. We should probably stop calling it Web 3.0–for several reasons–but this isn’t likely to be a broad change in the Web. I would think of it more like XML–agreement on a set of standards and ways of describing data relationships that give businesses the tools to start doing some interesting things quite efficiently. Once enough data is organized this way, even broader and more interesting applications become possible, and eventually you will see Web-wide changes in, and frankly, significant changes in everyday life.
BTW, the whole Web 2.0 thing drives me nuts. While the Web did start off as pretty static, as opposed to the big proprietary online services, it quickly took over the community functions from those earlier efforts. In the mid-90s we called them “virtual communities” but *that* was the great promise of the Web. Even efforts like Second Life are the inheritors of the work done in the 90s on avatar-based virtual communities and efforts like VRML to create virtual worlds. It was only after the big “content is king” push from the publishing world, coupled with Yahoo proving you could make money on advertising to an online community, that the one-way, content-driven view of the Web gained prominence in the late 90s and early 00s. “Web 2.0” is just the re-emergence of the original model, based on much better tools. There, I feel better.