Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

On the eve of a significant Web 3.0 conference this week in Santa Clara, Calif, a new report profiles some of the leading vendors in the space and concludes that both startups and mature organizations, including Thomson Reuters and Dow Jones, see a clear role in the technology to achieve their own strategic objectives.

The report, "On the Cusp: A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry," was authored by analyst and strategist David Provost, one of the original team members of Gomez.com, a web application experience management vendor.

The report notes that the vendors in this space cover the global arena, and also cover every aspect of the semantic web technology stack. Importantly, writes Provost, who will be speaking at this week's Web 3.0 Conference & Expo in Santa Clara on Oct. 16 and 17, "the vendors [in] this report have all the appearances of thriving, emerging technology companies."

He finds of note the fact that vendors are focusing on specific uses of semantic technology to create solutions in areas such as knowledge, risk, and content management, rather that earlier days when the focus for vendors was creating development tools that companies would use to create their own solutions. Equally interesting, he believes that there are as many opportunities for collaboration as there are for competition about this the wave of vendors in the semantic space.

Provost writes that, "The Semantic Web industry is alive, well, and it's increasingly competitive as a commercial technology. At this point, there are too many success stories and too much money being invested to dismiss the technology as non-viable. The Semantic Web is presently building a track record, which means the big wins and unanticipated uses are yet to come. In the meantime, adoption is occurring, and the early news is very good indeed."

Among the companies and initiatives Provost singles out for coverage are many that have been covered by Semanticweb.com. Among these are those from well-established content powerhouses. That includes the Calais Initiative, which Provost calls a "concrete step toward organizing and integrating the vast span of wild content with its own high-quality content" that can lead to competitive advantage for the 150-year old Thomson Reuters.
Other notable initiatives include Dow Jones Synaptica for building and managing vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauruses, and their metadata.

"It's likely the company will discover interesting and productive uses for Synaptica and everything this product spawns," Provost writes, and encourages readers to probe their Dow Jones account reps for information about it, as "the results could be very interesting."

Also making Provost's list are:

Yahoo SearchMonkey

Expert System with its Cogito offerings

Ontoprise

Virtuoso

Thetus

TopQuadrant

TWINE

To get insight into his perspective on each of these companies, and 10 others, the report is available here. (The license terms for the work are spelled out here.)

But it's how they all hang together that makes the Semantic Web's promise seem ever more within reach. As Provost notes, the full range of the technology's uses have yet to be discovered, but the work these companies are doing are starting to present a clearer vision of the value of the semantic web to the marketplace at all levels, from business managers to vendors to the development community.