This is the final market we look at in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series.

In Part 1, we looked at the overall market for enterprise software to see where semantic web technology could fit. The basic conclusion: it is part of the data integration business.

In this post we dive a bit deeper into the types of opportunity for semantic web vendors and how they can position to win a big share of the $229 billion enterprise software market.

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The Semantic Web blog recently caught up with Chris Lewis, who’s been writing our guest series (starting here) on search engine optimization and semantic relevance, to discuss with him the impact of Google’s acquisition of Metaweb, including its potential impact around SEO. (Lewis is the founder of Search Engine Semantics, a site which offers consulting services, information guides and online resources for the correct implementation of Semantics for SEO.)

To set the context for the discussion, Lewis notes first that, since both Metaweb and Freebase content are available via an open API, a big question is why did Google buy the company? "There's speculation that they will use the data as part of a competitive service against Facebook (Google Me). Or to compete against new services that Bing has been launching," he says.

Lewis believes -- from studying Google's existing data classification systems via semantic analysis -- that the most likely reason that Google made this acquisition is about ENTITIES [caps are his]. “We think that Google is playing a VERY BIG GAME here. Metabase organizes information around entities (people, places, things) and has developed a unique classification system currently numbering 12 million entities,” Lewis says. “Metabase allows web site owners to insert 'Topic Blocks' onto their web site free of charge for any keyword variable. Depending on the amount of content that they have aggregated, this may include news, blogs, wikis, Twitter content streams, links to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, images, movie trailers and more. As people interact on web sites with these Topic Blocks, all of the new data is added to the main Metaweb database.”

Our Q&A follows:

Q1: In its announcement of the Metaweb acquisition Google wrote on its blog “We believe that by improving Freebase, it will be a tremendous resource to make the web richer for everyone. And to the extent the web becomes a better place, this is good for webmasters and good for users.” Tell us how you think this is good for webmasters.
A1: The reason that Google thinks this will be good for webmasters is that Google will likely encourage adoption of Topic Blocks on web sites and blogs (based on free rich content, plus will help your SEO relevancy ranking). It will also create a technology framework for the Semantic Web without webmasters having to learn a host of new technologies (see answer to Q3 below).

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There’s little doubt that the iPad has been a revelation to the market – but like all revelations it's been subject to its fair share of dings. Just this week, for example, news came that Apple is facing a lawsuit over a claim that the iPad overheats and turns off when left in the sunlight, and a study from consumer research firm MyType revealed that iPad owners tend to be selfish elites. And of course, there’s the whole shortage issue that’s been trying the patience of would-be buyers, too.

Well, here’s some better news for the must-have (even if you can't get it) device of 2010: The iPad is going semantic. Sort of.

Turns out that the company behind the heralded new Flipboard application -- which provides on the iPad a magazine-style app for browsing a user’s social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter -- have acquired semantic web startup The Ellerdale Project. Flipboard is backed by outfits including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, and The Chernin Group that includes Ashton Kutcher as a founder are reportedly investors, as well.

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This is the final market we look at in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series.

Enterprise software is a huge market - $222.6 billion in 2009 according to Gartner. Put that in perspective. The online advertising market in the USA is only $50 billion. Even assuming the global online ad market is 2x the US market, enterprise software is 2x online advertising.

That $50 billion online ad market has come from nowhere in the 15 years since the start of the web. That is why online advertising has been the fun growth market in the last decade.

And most VCs have shunned the enterprise market in that same decade. They have had two reasons. One is the perception that the enterprise market is locked up by a few giant firms such as SAP, Oracle and IBM; actually they dominate their market far, far less than Google dominates online advertising. The other is that the cost of sale is too high; that remains true in most cases.

That lack of VC attention is a blessing for entrepreneurs! The market is less crowded. And customers do want innovation. They do not want to be reliant on a few large vendors; they know that these vendors will exploit that position at the customer's expense.

Even a small slice of the enterprise software market is big. Most VC want an addressable market that is $500m. There should be plenty of $500m niches within that $229 billion! And a bootstrapped entrepreneur does not even have to get that big a market; they could get a very healthy $10m business in a tiny $50m market.

And enterprise softwate is a market where ventures have historically not needed a lot of capital. Most of the current giants were bootstrapped.

So, at the macro level, enterprise software is a good place to be. But start-ups don't live or die at the macro level. They live or die by having a stunningly strong value proposition to overcome the corporate risk aversion. Think 10x. You have to be better, faster, cheaper by 10x orders of magnitude. That is the only way to get cost of sales to a reasonable level - or even to get to the point where you worry about cost of sales!

The question is, can Semantic Web technology have a 10x scale impact on enterprise software?

Image courtesy Flickr and BirdOfTheGalaxy.

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The IKS (Interactive Knowledge Stack) Open Source Project, a European Commission-funded effort to bring semantic technologies to vendors’ content management systems, is moving into its next stage this week. Helsinki will be the site of its Semantic Editor Hackathon, an event for testing some of the basic technologies the group has been working on for building a semantically-capable text editor that could be dropped in in place of common tools like TinyMCE and FCKEditor. The forum also is an opportunity for generating new ideas about how different tools can enter the picture at the editing phase for faster and smarter indexing and tagging of content.

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Taking semantic web technologies to the most popular social network seemingly hasn’t made an impact in customer satisfaction, yet. The social network in question is, of course, Facebook, which in April announced the Open Graph Protocol that lets developers use RDFa to make their web pages about things into objects in the social graph, and followed that up last month with the news it was adding the Open Graph protocol markup to every public page on Facebook, so that it’s easy to identify companies, musicians, and so on.

In the just-released American Customer Satisfaction Index’s debut rating of social media websites as part of its regular report on E-business: Internet Portals & Search Engines, and News & Information sites, Facebook achieved a score of 63 on a 100 scale.

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This is part of our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series. The market we are currently focused on is Healthcare. In Part 1 we looked at the big picture. In Part 2 we drilled into consumer health sites that are leveraging semantic web technology.

In Part 3 we looked at innovation in the enterprise space, how semantic web technology is being used by researchers in pharma and biotech firms

In this final Part 4, we look at how all the participants in the "health graph" can start to work around a common set of data standards in what may be the first glimpse of 21st century healthcare.

In our first post on Healthcare we wrote:

"Attempting to know enough about how to combat a nasty long term disease is hard enough. It is much harder when you are facing the emotional and physical trauma of the disease itself. The subject itself is complex. But even greater complexity comes from the overlapping and contradictory knowledge frameworks of the different participants:

• Patient and the close relatives/friends who are advocates and caregivers

• The trusted General Practitioner who really knows the patient but is not a specialist in the disease.

• Many specialists. What is exciting about medical advances today is the cross-disciplinary cooperation. The breakthrough may come from outside the mainstream. But each specialist has their own framework for looking at the problem.

• The Pharma companies who have drugs that are already FDA approved and others in the pipeline where they want patients for clinical trials.

• Academic and scientific researchers.

Of course the patient has to be the center of this "health graph". Their framework is the one that matters in the end."

The answer of course is the fabled Electronic Health Record (EHR). I say "fabled" as this has been forecast by people for a looooong time. Cynics might write it off. They would be wrong. Technologies that take a long time to come to the mainstream sometimes do so just after their demise has been declared by "sensible" folks.

What caught our eye was a case study related to Diabetes - a current "scourge" in America and other countries. So we decided to focus this post on that case study and the product behind it. This may point the way to what we are calling the "health graph".

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In the physical world, you can ride a ferry from Calais to Dover (you know, where the bluebirds are flying). In the semantic web world, you can fact tag text with the OpenCalais web service and sentiment tag it with the OpenDover web service, which, contrary to its U.K.-influenced name, actually hails from a company in Holland, Byelex Multimedia Products.

Its approach to sentiment-based tagging is to parse text against domain specific and general collocation vocabulary sets, to help with the word disambiguation issues, according to company founder H.E.R.M. Vissia. Plans are afoot to make the web service available as an API soon through Mashery, so that developers can use it as one source for creating applications that marketers, research companies, and others can use to automate insight into opinions on topics, trends, services and the like that surface in tweets and blogs. (Developers have single-sign-on access through Mashery to other semantic web service APIs we’ve written about here, including Primal, YoLink, Zemanta and zoominfo.)

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This is part of our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series. The market we are currently focused on is Healthcare. In Part 1 we looked at the big picture. In Part 2 we drilled into consumer health sites that are leveraging semantic web technology.

In this post, Part 3, we look at innovation in the enterprise space, how semantic web technology is being used by researchers in pharma and biotech firms

In the final Part 4, we will look at how all the participants in the "health graph" can start to work around a common set of data standards in what may be the first glimpse of 21st century healthcare.

Bio/Pharma may be the first enterprise software market where semantic web technology breaks into the mainstream. So this is interesting as a pointer to what will be the final 10th market in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series - enterprise software.

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Google’s announcement Friday that it acquired MetaWeb set the web world spinning.

That’s an acquisition that dwarfs some of the other recent ones we reported. If not in dollar size (not disclosed but expected to top the $57 million in VC funding Metaweb raised, according to the NY Times), then in pure potential impact. With some 12 million entities in Metaweb’s Freebase open database of everything, Google says that the goal is to work with its new business “to improve search and make the web richer and more meaningful for everyone.”

Interestingly enough, however, one won’t find the term “semantic web” (lower or upper case) in the blog entry about the acquisition. At least one online discussion I’ve seen has raised the point that 'semantic' is a term that Google never seems to use. That's not exactly the case -- it does talk about semantics in search and semantic search. But what is true is that the search leader does seem to shy away from the phrase "semantic web."

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U.K. Semantic Web efforts are in full swing, as evidenced by a couple of recent developments:

● The University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, whose roster of professors includes Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt, said it is now the UK’s first University department to release all its public data in open linked data format.

This includes data around some 20,000 publications in its Eprints archive of research papers (though not the documents themselves), research groups, teaching modules, and seminars and events. What’s key about the announcement is that there’s no legal requirement for what can be done with all the public (RDF) data from rdf.ecs.soton.ac.uk and eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk, or around its attribution, so as not to impede the development of large-scale mashups.

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This is part of our Creative Destruction 7 Act play series. The market we are currently focused on is Healthcare. In Part 1 we looked at the big picture. In this Part 2 we drill into consumer health sites that are leveraging semantic web technology. In Part 3 we will look at innovation in the enterprise space, how semantic web technology is being used by researchers in pharma and biotech firms.

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