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Does anybody use semantic techniques (RDF, OWL, machine reasoning, etc.) in comercial apps or is it still an academia's toy?

skaffman
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Łukasz Bownik
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4 Answers4

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There are many organizations who have started using it. Like BBC Programmes and BBC Music, Crunchbase, OpenCalias are few examples. Many Biological data repositories store data using these technologies as well. Commercial software to store and query RDF like virtuoso are also available.
Search engines have also started using and displaying such data (For example see Google snippets)

Tasawer Khan
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    Nice recent blog post by BBC on how they used Semantic Web technologies to drive their World Cup website - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2010/07/bbc_world_cup_2010_dynamic_sem.html I also saw recently that ZDNet are using it as well – RobV Jul 14 '10 at 12:48
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Oracle have done some work and IBM have done some research too.

I studied the semantic web at university a couple of years ago and I wasn't convinced then. It doesn't seem to have made much progress beyond academia since then.

The basic problem is that needs to get a critical mass of ontologies to be widely used, but creating that critical mass is too difficult so it just isn't going to happen.

Some other questions that are related:

Community
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macleojw
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The short answer is yes. If you look at the series of SemTech Conferences that have taken place in San Francisco, New York, London, Washington DC and Berlin starting in 2012, you'll see that these meetings are focused on business, not academia. You have businesses like the BBC and its use of semantic web technology and tools for the World Cup, mentioned by Rob V, as well as others like Franz, Orbis and Ontotext. In the world of biomedicine, Remedy Informatics is using biomedical ontologies as the foundation of a product line to support the development of disease registries. I had to put links to these resources elsewhere since I'm new and haven't yet proven that I'm not spamming or a 'bot.

IMO, as long as you keep the "scruffy" world of linked data loosely coupled with the "neat" world of ontologies it's possible to make practical applications.

Good Luck!

Community
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courtneypk
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The technologies are used by companies such as Garlik.com, who have created massively scalable semantic data stores (4Store and later 5Store) which have recently been licensed to the UK Stationery Office to support the UK government Open Data initiative.

DNA
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