1. Renewed attention to the quality of technology and concrete and measurable applications.  This first wish may be an easy prediction, as recession always tends to mark the end of nonsense and Pindaric flights, i.e. flights of fancy proliferating in times of plenty (just think of labels such as Web 3.0 and all sorts of speculations on Semantic Web and semantics of all kinds). I very well know that the hype of semantic technologies won’t last forever (a new bubble is always waiting around the corner) but, as we are currently in a recession, at least for the next couple of years we won’t have to see 10-20 million dollars wasted in start-ups lacking innovative technologies and a concrete approach to the market (created only to get the attention and money of some big fish ready to buy them for fear of  missing opportunities, thus feeding a vicious circle and giving sense to a business model that makes little sense in itself).

2. A more widespread and concrete use of semantics on the Web. Again thanks to the processes mentioned above, hopefully we will start to see some genuine use of semantic information: for example, using conceptual information, and not only keywords, to retrieve information in a more accurate and correct way, as well as relational information, i.e. relating data that are not directly connected. Such developments will come as soon as the experts realize that manual tagging and folksonomies (however valuable and often useful) do not represent a true solution to the problems of knowledge management on the web, because all things considered, like everything done by human people, manual tagging and folksonomies are too subjective and dependent on individual abilities and will.

3. Linked-data: a new semantic trend on the Web. I expect linked-data to become the next buzzword for those dealing with semantics on the web. Linked data are easy to develop (at least in part), contain the concept of link, and are great to imagine fantastic scenarios where everything is saved and cross-referenced.  In reality, at least in their present implementation, linked data aren’t particularly innovative: the possibility to start from a text where Steve Jobs is mentioned and follow a link to his article on Wikipedia and maybe to some other data extracted from a well-known web site, doesn’t seem very innovative to me.

Something different (and truly revolutionary) would be the possibility to have these kinds of links available also for people, companies and products not universally known nor widely discussed (in a semi-structured way) by authoritative sources. To do that, however, we need a true semantic technology, infrastructures (like this one also involving us) and a lot of hard work. The concept of linked data is very interesting and deserves developments, so we hope that the old unrealistic expectations (regularly disregarded) won’t make someone throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Every December/January, everyone makes predictions for the new year.

I hope I will be able to write down mine (maybe in the next post), but for now I prefer to recommend the “Top 10 Predictions 2009” made by IDC analysts. It’s an interesting reading and I agree on various points. In particular, IDC is convinced that 2009 will be an important year for information access since critical releases of new solutions are scheduled by such big vendors as HP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft etc. (I don’t completely agree on that: I believe these releases won’t be so critical), and above all, because the problem of information access is continuously increasing, so innovative approaches to control the growing volume of information are more than urgent.

I believe the present recession will slow down this inevitable process (more than IDC assumes), but at the same time it will make it more selective and effective, because with falling budgets, waste and delays are not allowed.

This morning we announced that an Italian agency for national health services has selected our semantic software to improve patient use of the organization’s Web site for how-to queries and healthcare questions.

• An 80-percent increase in online queries sent through the COGITO search engine, proving the system is being used.
• A 70-percent increase in time spent on Web pages sent by COGITO, proving patients are finding the information provided by the system is valuable and worth reading.
• A 46-percent increase in user visits that start and end on the same page, proving patients are finding exactly what they need in one click.

If you’re wondering more about semantics, it’s important to consider that seeing semantics in action is the best way to understand its benefits. We’ve worked hard to provide access to online demos of our software for Intranet and Internet search and analysis, mobile and natural language search, and sentiment analysis. And the other, useful (and very exciting) challenge we continue to face is evaluating the return on investment with our prospects and/or to help compare and contrast the return on different investments.