Keynote about Semantic Web at Bayer Innovation Fair

I was invited to be a keynote speaker at the Bayer Business Services (BBS) Innovation Fair 2010 in Singapore. The fair aims at stimulating and presenting novel approaches within BBS and jointly between the different branches of Bayer. It was very interesting to get insights into such a huge company and to see from what directions innovation is approached, be it making interaction with customers and traveling easier using tablets, data integration and e-learning.
My keynote was a very high level introduction to the Semantic Web. I introduced the basic ideas and motivation behind it, compared it to the existing Web, introduced RDF (very briefly, based on the excellent slides by Fabien Gandon http://www.slideshare.net/fabien_gandon/rdf-in-a-nutshell-v1), and gave lots of examples. I also spend two minutes on the real time Web, another important development of the current Web to be aware of.

While authoring my talk, I thought hard about an example that shows the relevance of Semantic Web technology in such a business scenario. I finally came up with the following: the management gives you the goal to increase sales by 20%. How can you do that? Imagine you have a dashboard where you can easily integrate different datasets, e.g., marketing budget, sales force, data about hospitals, etc. Your dashboard also has a nice visualization that gives you clues and makes predictions where to invest.

In my slides, I made a quite ugly mock-up what the above scenario can look like. Imagine my surprise when I saw that at two of the booths people were actually working on such dashboards. And indeed, one problem they were facing was the data integration. Data had to be provided in a standard format, using predefined tables etc. Exactly one shortcoming Semantic Web technology is addressing.

Find my slides below, but keep in mind that a huge part was quite interactive with live demos.

The Potential of Web 3.0

View more presentations from Carsten Ullrich.