A presentation on the trends in Linked Data, including a discussion of opportunities for return on investment for enterprise deployments.

1. 26 April 2011
David Wood
david@3roundstones.com
@prototypo

2. Semantic technologies provide greater computing context. Let’s discuss context. The good
news is that we are living in a golden age. The bad news is that many or even most are
having a difficult time keeping up.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sjungling/5974860/

3. $ cat foo.txt
| grep blah |
sort
1970s 1980s 1990s
A neat little package Client-Server The Early Web
A Golden Age may be identified by its internal rate of change.
Note the tendency to centralize first and distribute later. Distribution is harder.

4. Universal Client Ubiquitous,
reusable applications
URL Curation
Universal Connection Logic and interlinking
Web
of Data
Universal Database
The Web is very different. The Web of Data is different yet again, and has larger
ramifications.

5. Access per 100 population worldwide
80
70 Mobile cellular subscriptions
60 Fixed telephone lines
Internet users
50
40
30
20
10
0
1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008
The elephant in the room is the mobile market. New Internet users in the US are flattening (and has been for 5
years). Growth worldwide is still occurring. About 25% of the world’s population uses the Internet. Almost every
working adult in the US has a cell phone. Lots of non-working adults have cell phones in the US. Sales are
continuing at the rate of over 30M in Q4 2010. 19% of phones in US are smart phones, which means 80% are
not, but nearly half of new sales are smart phones.

6. The PC is yesterday’s news. Businesses built on PCs are also yesterday’s news.
Photo credit: Sue Waters, http://www.flickr.com/photos/suewaters/1843032358/

7. You may have bought your last laptops, your last servers. If not, you competitors have.
Mobile devices are new clients. Servers and systems administrators have moved to the cloud.
Photo credit: Apple

8. Our data is still in the dinosaur age. Traditional data is hierarchical, tabular with external
schemas, and so are the systems that support them.
Photo credit: David Wood, 2009

9. “We are beginning to routinely deal with vast quantities of data and only through a metadata
management strategy can we tackle the quantity of data to look for the nuggets for gold.”
Credit: The Economist, Monstrous Amounts of Data, Feb 27th, 2010 Special Report on Managing Information.

10. We may want to fly immediately to some New World nirvana, but we can’t.
Photo credit: David Wood, 2009

11. ...at least partially because our tools aren’t mature enough. Some techniques are ready now,
though.
Compare to the airline industry and its impact on the world (~2.1M people will fly today).
Photo credits: David Wood, 2009, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ccgd/276642318/

12. Users of RDF today. You may have heard of some of them.

13. Users of microformats. They can only scale the conversation further using an extensible
mechanism (like RDF) to combine microformat techniques.
Image: The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and JESS3

14. Microsoft has reinvented the RDF wheel in NTFS, Sharepoint and other products after pulling
out of standards activities due to perceived competition.

15. The painter... does not fit the paints to the world.
He fits himself to the paint.
-- Paul Klee
Why is RDF important? Because we must fit ourselves to a better paint to deal with
information overload and changing business requirements.

16. R&D is research. Marston Bates said, "Research is the process of going up alleys to see if
they are blind." Research is difficult if not impossible to tie to ROI.
Geek & Poke comic from http://www.theharteofmarketing.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/
2011/02/roi-craze-hype-harte.jpg

17. 4% 17%
13%
16%
6 months
49% 12 months
18 months
24 months
More than 24 months
However, corporate R&D must, sooner or later, be tied to ROI. The process is generally
sooner (< 18 months for IT projects).
Source: “Data Center Transformation: Key Implementation Drivers”, Hansa/GCR and HP, Oct.
2008, http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/images/chart_it_roi_370x388.gif

18. $50B in revenue (2010), $1.3B net income. 19% of consumer electronics market.

19. store name
hours
address
phone
geo
ratings
services
events
RDFa added to the sites for 1,100 retail stores, including store-specific blogs.

20. Why?
58% of Americans research online before they buy.
Pew Internet & American Life Project: http://www.pewinternet.org/Press-Releases/2010/
Online-Product-Research.aspx

21. “We really didn’t go into it with any expectations. We
just wanted to see if it was something we might want
to do. That’s why we were caught by surprise by
the results… we weren’t really expecting any.”
-- Jay Myers, Lead Development Engineer, Best Buy
http://searchnewscentral.com/20110207129/Technical/rdfa-the-inside-story-from-best-
buy.html

22. The impact:
30% increase in organic search results
15% increase in click-through rate (CTR)
http://searchnewscentral.com/20110207129/Technical/rdfa-the-inside-story-from-best-
buy.html

23. 100%
House email
90%
SEO
80%
Paid search
Banners,
70% buttons
Text-link ads
Usage >>>
Affiliate Marketing
60% Behavioral
Contextual targeting
targeting
Rented email
lists
50% Rich media/
video
40%
Pop-ups/
pop-unders
30%
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%
Marketers Reporting “Great” Return on Investment
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised after all; SEO is known to be effective.
The size of the bubble illustrates the relative budget compared to other tactics.
Source: Marketing Sherpa and Ad Tech: Year End Surveys, January 2009
See also: http://trainingtime.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/marketers-share-plans-for-
marketing-in-a-recession/

24. BBC is the largest broadcaster in the world, with 23,000 employees.

25. A Web presence for
each broadcast
1,000-1,500 programs broadcast per day.
BBC Programmes (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes) provides for each broadcast:
a Web identifier, HTML pages, machine-readable feeds (RDF/XML, JSON and XML)

26. "Creating web identifiers for every item the BBC has
an interest in, and considering those as aggregations of
BBC content about that item, allows us to enable very
rich cross-domain user journeys."
-- Yves Raimond, BBC
Needed to relate information across media for both users and third-party developers.

27. A Web presence for
each artist
BBC Music is underpinned by the Musicbrainz music database and Wikipedia.

29. A Web presence for
each species (and other
biological ranks), habitat
and adaptation
Wildlife programmes (clips and episodes) are identified by tagging the clip or episode with
the appropriate dbpedia URI.

30. "The RDF representations of these web identifiers allow
developers to use our data to build applications."
-- Yves Raimond
The LOD/LED approach allows “different development teams to concentrate on different
domains while at the same time benefiting from the activities of the other teams.”

32. Each HTML page is paired with a machine-readable data representation.

33. Like HTML and RDF, credit cards have a human-readable side and a machine-readable side.

34. A government use case - that applies to large enterprises, too.
Envirofacts is an application built on a data warehouse consisting of data from many
relational databases.

35. A government use case - that applies to large enterprises, too.
Envirofacts is an application built on a data warehouse consisting of data from many
relational databases.

36. A government use case - that applies to large enterprises, too.
Envirofacts is an application built on a data warehouse consisting of data from many
relational databases.

38. Changing data from a single relational database to another (e.g. for an upgrade) routinely
requires 6 months or more.
Combining LOD takes a matter of weeks to re-model the data (4-6 week sprint) and days to
reuse the data in applications.

39. Pitney Bowes has quite a number of facilities in this dataset.

40. 10-90% failure rates: http://www.dwinfocenter.org/against.html
50% failure rates: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/bounded-rationality/a-50-data-warehouse-
failure-rate-is-nothing-new-4669
Failure reasons: http://tmvilla.wordpress.com/2008/02/16/top-five-reasons-data-
warehouse-projects-fail/
Cooperation without coordination: http://semanticweb.com/semantic-web-elevator-pitch-
for-journalistic-research_b17662

41. • Linked Data means:
“Cooperation without coordination”
10-90% failure rates: http://www.dwinfocenter.org/against.html
50% failure rates: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/bounded-rationality/a-50-data-warehouse-
failure-rate-is-nothing-new-4669
Failure reasons: http://tmvilla.wordpress.com/2008/02/16/top-five-reasons-data-
warehouse-projects-fail/
Cooperation without coordination: http://semanticweb.com/semantic-web-elevator-pitch-
for-journalistic-research_b17662

42. Scope: Bigger than any other deployed system
Adaptability: Changes piecemeal
Ownership: Nobody owns it

43. http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/
http://3roundstones.com/linking-enterprise-data/
http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/
http://3roundstones.com/linking-enterprise-data/