Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The Book of Odds web site offers a forum for determining the odds of everyday life (see previous article), letting users combine odds statements in unexpected ways in real time to compare, for example, whether there’s a greater risk of dying from an encounter with a shark or a vending machine (it’s the latter).

It’s interesting that the site is powered by Cambridge Semantics technology, because that vendor sees its business customers increasingly eager to take advantage of its tools for combining, using and sharing data from disparate sources - regardless of variations in data structure - to deal with their business risks.

Along with growing their toplines and controlling costs, risk is one of the most prominent issues Cambridge customers want to address, says CEO Michael Cataldo.

“And the biggest risk is associated with questions you just don’t know and so you can’t answer,” he says. “One of the reasons I think semantics is going to be so hot is that it puts the capability of answering those kinds of questions in the hands of the end users.”

A site like BookofOdds.com likely couldn’t have been developed if it had followed traditional data integration models, which are all about anticipating in advance how data will be used and combined. The Book of Odds founders knew they couldn’t anticipate how their users would want to compare different odds statements to figure out the chances of one event being more likely to happen than another. And neither can business anticipate in advance what data they’ll need to integrate to gain insight into risks they haven’t even yet had reason to contemplate.

Imagine, Cataldo poses, if financial firms had been able to ask what their exposure was to subprime mortgages, using semantic technology to reach across the disparate sources hosting that information.

“Years before the subprime mortgage crisis, who would have thought to create a data warehouse to store subprime mortgage information in case a crisis ever came, so that they could be ready for it?” asks Cataldo.

But information systems connected to a semantic fabric could have, on the fly, accessed data by the concept or meaning of subprime mortgage, no matter how that term was referenced in the source systems. So such an exposure could have been understood and hopefully addressed before they became a problem. Too late for that one, but plenty of unknown risks always will await businesses of every stripe. And integration at the point of decision-making can be extremely powerful as a means of discovering exposure to risk.

Addressing the risks of shadow IT

That’s just the start of where semantic technology can take things. Once that data is all available at a level playing field, regardless of source, system, or data structure, “you can effectively run rules that go across all your applications, which is pretty much impossible without semantic technology,” Cataldo says. “The same thing with inference capabilities. You've got to be able to see across, connect to and understand the data all at the same level. It’s really early for this and there are a lot of things that we haven’t even contemplated yet.”

For business, semantic technology also can address the risks of shadow IT – all those systems and processes that get created outside the realm of enterprise control. These are the spreadsheets and word processing documents that users create and stack with data to solve their own problems, which then come to represent their own data model.

“So it’s really hard for the corporation to incorporate that data and therefore that business process isn’t incorporated into the mainstream, and it can leave a company exposed if the system breaks down or the person [who created it] goes away,” Cataldo says.

“The great thing about the flexibility of the semantic fabric and the ability to absorb new data on the fly is the ability to layer that fabric over those shadow IT-based processes, so now the data actually becomes part of the corporate infrastructure. It’s within control and within reach of the people in the corporation who need it, and it’s reuseable and redeployable if something happens to the process owner. These are really important things, especially in a tough economy those can represent significant exposures, and people are absolutely interested in addressing those issues.”