Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Mills Davis, founder and managing director of Project10X and the author of the report, breaks things down into opportunity areas, key trends, examples, and terms, including mapping four value perspectives.

According to the report, user experience, social computing, smart software and things, and the semantic ecosystem are the main perspectives of value innovation in the Web 3.0 world, which the author defines as being about representing meanings, connecting knowledge, and putting these to work in ways that make the Internet experience of internet more relevant and pleasant.

The role that semantic technologies play in tapping new sources of value, the report says, is in providing the capabilities and building blocks of product, service, and business innovation, as the web experience shifts to a knowledge-centric rather than data- and procedure-centric realm. They reduce the time, risk and cost to develop and evolve services by achieving "added development economies" that include the use of shared knowledge models as building blocks, autonomic software techniques, and end-user, do-it-yourself development methodologies. By adding intelligence to the user interface, applications, and infrastructure -- for example, tailoring the presentation of information and tasks to their preferences -- can produce ten-fold gains in communication effectiveness, service delivery, and user productivity and satisfaction, Davis writes.

Akin to that, machine learning that enables systems to acquire new knowledge from past cases, experience, exploration, and user input, become more valuable as they are continually used and continually grow their knowledge base. That, Davis says, "may improve system life cycle economics by (a) requiring less frequent upgrading or replacement of core software components, and (b) enabling new incremental extensions to revenue models through add-on knowledgeware and software-as-a-service."

The fourth way to tap value is via the entire semantic ecosystem, which solve the otherwise "intractable at Web scale" problems around the economics of mobility, scale, complexity, security, interoperability, and dynamic change across networks, systems, and information sources, the report contends.

Says Davis, "Semantic ecosystems will be future-proof, able to grow dynamically, evolve, adapt, self-organize, and self-protect. Web 3.0 will lay the foundations for ubiquitous Web including autonomic intellectual property, Web-scale security and identity management, and global micro-commerce in knowledge-based assets. The value vector for semantic infrastructure is 2-3 orders of magnitude gains in capability, performance, and life cycle economics at Web scale."

Pretty heady stuff -- and not just for consumer-driven applications. Davis specifically tackles semantic technologies as they relate to the enterprise, as well, in terms of addressing the issues businesses regularly grapple with, such as the inflexibility and high costs associated with implementing, maintaining, and interconnecting today's "monolithic" enterprise processes. He predicts that in the Web 3.0 world, all business processes supported by commercial software products will become semantically enabled, leading to the phasing out of hard-coded schemas, interfaces and procedures.

It's happening today, he contends, and further semantic enterprise commercial software opportunities include Semantic ERP (Enterprise resource planning), where an enterprise ontology integrates planning, operations, finance, HR, manufacturing and services; Semantic CRM (customer relationship management), where shared knowledge models inter-relate information and orchestrate activities around sales, marketing, and support; and Semantic SCM (supply chain management), for representing knowledge about information and processes so that it is discovered, interpreted and executed directly and adaptively in real time by systems of supplier, manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer, and consumer.

Davis concludes that semantic technologies "will burgeon into billion dollar markets for semantic technologies and solutions that, in turn, will fuel trillion-dollar economic expansions world-wide over the next decade." (Something we sure could use given the current state of the economy!) But he cautions it's not solely about the technology. Writes Davis, "The key to successful innovation is design, engineering and delivery of new configurations of value. As experienced by customers, value is contextual, multidimensional, and co-evolving. It encompasses all aspects of the business, including the value contributed by its technology building blocks."

The 32-page report is available in its entirety at www.Project10X.com for $495.