23-Nov-2000/Janne Saarela Business opportunities on the semantic Web Janne Saarela

2 Overview Business potential on  Business-to-customer (B2C)  Business-to-business (B2B) interfaces Requirements for  content providers  service providers  end-users Action proposals for  EC  companies

3 Business opportunities in B2C Users of electronic services look for  configurability while being  independent on the type of content Variety of content objects poses challenges:  can we write software that understands ~400 different file formats? of course not: some of the formats encode little semantics (e.g. audio, video)  aren’t formats supposed to be only for presentation purposes for human beings? human-consumption

4 Business opportunities in B2C Machine-consumption can be accomplished by:  remaining independent of the file formats  introducing metadata  metadata needs common ontologies i.e. shared vocabularies  Side note: marketing departments are not doing a wonderful job for XML when they say that ’everybody can invent their own element names’

5 Business opportunities in B2C Machine-understandability of information enables the ’Saarela curve’ time interactivity

6 Business opportunities in B2C Customers are used to interactivity at the office but morning and evening are rather spent ’relaxing’ Examples:  deliver the financial news on home TV in the morning  deliver the calendar entries in to the car stereo system while driving to work  get shopping reminders from your home fridge  get news summaries on TV in the evening Can I have all of the above without interactivity, please.

7 Business opportunities in B2B Ecommerce in B2B has so far consisted of textual and numeric content for which XML has been a perfect match! e.g. online transactions Multimedia is getting associated with standardized metadata Web (W3C) provides us today with Resource Description Framework (RDF) next year ISO will deliver MPEG-7

8 Business opportunities in B2B Media sector: content sales over the Internet  business customers order for specific type of content both in format (e.g. text, graphics, images, audio, video) and in content (e.g. domestic, forestry, financial)  Example: a forestry company is interested in receiving notifications in real-time about all new content related to forestry in EU area

9 Requirements for content providers Understand the benefits of spending more time on generating metadata  e.g. in media sector the journalists need to understand the new way of working

10 Requirements for service providers Creation of new services that no longer operate on content but on metadata  E.g. news summaries are enabled by (who, where, when, what) type of metadata on videos  E.g. demonstration versions of new PC games are automatically notified to interested customers

11 Requirements for end-users End-user software is today a browser  whether an HTML browser or a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) Main observation: the browser only views data  could we integrate browser better with other applications?  could this integration benefit from metadata? (today the integration is typically done through MIME types e.g. application/pdf is managed by Acrobat Reader)  Take advantage of the available metadata with new tools

12 Action proposal for EC If EC cannot be asked to produce common vocabularies i.e. ontologies for different business areas Can we ask for vocabulary tools (creation/maintenance?) development support?

13 Action proposal for companies In order to create common vocabularies  stay tuned to relevant interest groups (national/international)  participate in the interest groups  promote the shared vocabularies Why?  in order to promote openness  in order to interoperate with other ’semantic systems’

14 Summary Business potential on  Business-2-customer (B2C)  Business-2-business (B2B) interfaces Requirements for  content providers  service providers  end-users Action proposals for  EC  companies

23-Nov-2000/Janne Saarela 15 Contact information 34 Helsinki Finland