Semantic Web as Competitive Advantage

When Tom Ilube left his post as CIO of Egg, the U.K.’s first online bank, it was with the intention of founding another large-scale company aimed at meeting an emerging consumer need and built on an emerging technology with practical potential. The result is U.K.-based, identity-protection firm Garlik, which weekly sweeps the web and presents to some 60,000 consumers a multi-sourced picture of potential identity fraud risks and how they might address them, and it’s underpinned by semantic web technologies.

Ilube, CEO of Garlik, is betting that this decade’s emerging technology will be as strategically important to the success of his company as Internet technologies were to Egg. Ilube first had to convince himself that the web in the next five years will shift fundamentally from the document web to a data web, where the meaning of that data is made explicit in some semantic form. Next, he had to determine whether semantic web technologies could scale to industrial-strength levels, given expectations that Garlik's customer base will grow and the fact that personal information on the web is, at the least, doubling every year.

“What is important is, what combinations of information make you more or less exposed. It’s not just that I found your name there or date of birth or mother’s maiden name here, it’s that if all of those are available, even in different places, then suddenly I have enough information to take over your identity,” says Ilube. “We highlight that by looking at multiple sources online and give some meaning and context, to highlight what puts you at risk and whether that risk is low, medium, or high.”

Ilube knew that he would need to scale to billions of triples, the relationships among entities expressed in RDF format -- and today, Garlik’s semantic store scales to 60 billion of them, with capacity beyond that. The company has implemented its technology across about 100 lightweight, low-cost Linux boxes strung together so that it can easily scale horizontally, one server at a time.

“It’s very different architecting a large corporate system where essentially the boundaries are known, even if it’s a large company, versus designing and building a genuine web-based consumer system where you don’t know the boundaries,” he says.

The third and final question Ilube had to consider was perhaps the most important. “For the problem area I was engaged in (the question was), would this set of technologies give me a genuine advantage over other ways of trying to deliver solutions?” Ilube says. “I concluded they would.”

Not today, necessarily, but over the next few years -- as customer demands evolve and the environment becomes more complex -- Ilube expects that semantic technologies will provide the best foundation for Garlik to quickly deliver new services.

From his experience as a CIO, Ilube knows just how critical it is to build a flexible infrastructure that can change to meet new business requirements. Back at the bank, he recounts, whenever anyone wanted to change or add a field to the customer database, it would immediately cause a panic.