This post was orginally published on my personal blog 'chitchatting about information delivery':

The Silicon Valley Semantic Technology Group organized by Peter Berger is one of the meetups that i have been going to for a while and have even helped coordinate and host in the past. Last Thursday the 15th they had what seems to be a great session about Semantics in Financial Services with David Newman who is a Senior Architect in the Enterprise Architecture group at Wells Fargo Bank (now part of Wachovia). I missed it due to the bambina, but lucky for me and for the rest of you that were not able to make it, the excellent slidedeck that David Newman used has been posted on Slideshare- see below (thanks Peter!). Based on the Slidedeck, the presentation covered:

• The Case for Semantic Technology- Important Key Drivers, Limitations and Benefits
• Overview of Semantic Technology - Basic Overview that hits all the most know items for business and technology folks
• Semantic Technology Providers and Adopters -a high level list. He makes mention of Dow Jones as an adopter but forgets to mention Synaptica as a technology provider of ontology editor
• Semantic Applications for Financial Services- I am always a sucker for 'use-cases' of semantic technologies in the enterprise and Newman provides two slides that outline various semantic applications for financial services which i have highlighted below
• Recommended Semantic Technology Books and Articles

Many of the Semantic Applications that Newman points out for financial services can also be extended to other non-financial services companies but his breakdown highlights specific opportunities for financial services. Wish i had been there in person to learn more about which of these applications Newman and his team are tackling using semantic technologies:

From Peter Berger's introduction: David Newman serves as a Senior Architect in the Enterprise Architecture group at Wells Fargo Bank. He has been following semantic technology for the last 3 years; and has developed several business ontologies. He has been instrumental in thought leadership at Wells Fargo on the application of Semantic Technology and is a representative of the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC)on the W3C SPARQL Working Group

Note: This post was orginally published on my personal blog: "chitchatting about information delivery"

I looked at the calendar yesterday and the realization that November is upon us hit me pretty hard. With November comes a lot of pumpkin (here is my new pumpkin addiction recipe for this year) and a few speaking spots before i go out on maternity leave (yeah yeah i can't believe it's already time either!).

Just like last year and the year before i will be attending and presenting at Enterprise Search Summit and Taxonomy Bootcamp which i am really looking forward to. At Enterprise Search Summit West i have been asked to participate on a panel titled "Is Semantic Technology Real?" moderated by Rob Gonzalez from Endeca.

At Taxonomy Bootcamp, i have been asked to be part of a panel that Wendi Pohs is running titled "From the Lighthouse: Visioneering Taxonomies’ Future which promises to be an engaging panel on the future of taxonomies. I have been in forward looking mode for the last few months so i have been thinking about this subject quite a bit.

It is not too late to register and you can use these codes for some discounts- Enterprise Search Registration with SPK5 code and Taxonomy Bootcamp registration with SPK5 code.

My sessions last year featured a Synaptica Case Study at Taxonomy Bootcamp titled "Proquest: Finding a Common Language: Bringing Complex and Disparate Vocabularies" (video available here) and at Enterprise Search Summit a presentation on Centralized Taxonomy Management for Enterprise Information Systems (video available here)

Looking forward to seeing everyone there including the Dow Jones Taxonomy Team (Dow Jones is a KMWorld sponsor- note: my speaking spots are not sponsored spots but by invintation of the moderators) and the Synaptica team who are exhibiting and sponsoring Taxonomy Bootcamp!

Image|Flickr| minipixel

Patrick Lambe has been analyzing the knowledge, skills and experience needs of the taxonomy profession for a while and as part of this his work he is conducting a survey on the present and future of taxonomy work and the needs of taxonomy professionals. Patrick is the author of a great taxonomy development book titled "Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organizational Effectiveness" and an active writer on the topic of taxonomists and taxonomy development on his Green Chameleon blog.

Patrick, like some members of our own Dow Jones taxonomy team will also be Taxonomy Bootcamp in San Jose this November. Acording to his orginal request for survey responses, participants in the survey will also get a report of the results (which will include additional research beyond the survey).  Patrick writes: "For those of you who believe that taxonomies still have a future, this might make interesting reading, and for those of you who believe a la Theresa Regli that “taxonomies are dead”, we’d like to hear from you on why!"

You can take the survey at http://tinyurl.com/taxonomywork

Image|Flickr|Jima

Here within the Dow Jones Enterprise Media group we deal with almost every kind of enterprise employee catering to their specific information delivery and management needs. From the PR Communications teams who are monitoring what people are saying about their brands across various mediums; Sales and Marketing that need to keep on top of their clients, competitors and industries; Researchers and Knowledge Managers who need depth and breath for their research and of course Investment Bankers and Traders who rely on timely and accurate content. These are just a few of them and if you are not aware of all the diverse tools and solutions we offer, our new Dow Jones Solutions site now gives you a comprehensive look by different roles, business needs and products.

Lucky for us in the Synaptica and Taxonomy Services team, we typically get to work across all different types of clients whose needs can vary drastically specifically on how they are leveraging controlled vocabularies. In future posts, I will be highlighting some of those other segments but for this post i am going to highlight "Why Taxonomy Matters" to Sales Professionals and Relationship Managers.

Have you ever tried to have a conversation about taxonomy with a sales or sales operation person in your company? Well if the conversation didn't turn to taxidermy you are probably lucky! So here are some things you can bring up next time you are in a meeting with your Sales teams and are trying to convince them that Taxonomy Matters to them- try these on for size:

Product Alignment – To better target the right customer, a taxonomy solution provides the backbone to build a faster pipeline

Territory Alignment – Segmenting companies based on region, industry, company size as well as other available categories will increase the likelihood to find the right audience

Field Sales – Combining the accurate information from product and territory alignment with the proper event triggers, sales forces will be able to pinpoint when to discuss a particular product to a potential customer

Want some more use cases for why taxonomy matters to sales? contact us daniela.barbosa@dowjones.com or use the contact form from this blog.

Over 1,300 people registered for Part 1 of the Semantic Web Webinar Series: Discover the Semantic Web and both Christine Connors and myself were delighted with the attendance and the feedback we received!

Like Christine explained during our introduction, as attendee registrations were coming through we regularly reviewed the list, wanting to make sure that we were writing for our actual audience. What we found were strong numbers in three types of business role in particular – and happily for us, the three categories we most wanted to engage as part of this series as described below.

To further validate the attendees and get a feeling for where our enterprise customers are, during the webinar the first poll that we conducted was a simple one to record where attendees were in regards to their experience with semantic web. The following results are the aggregate of the two sessions:

When you think about Semantic Web, what is the first thought that pops into your head?
61.2 % > I am new to the Semantic Web and Interested in Learning More
26.4% > I am currently knowledgeable on the Semantic Web and would like to expand this knowledge
12.4% > I am currently involved in Semantics-related project in my company

Being that part one of the series was titled DIscover, the target level of expertise was perfect!

Looking through the final list of registered attendees, I took their titles and made the following Wordle to provide a visualization of the titles of the attendees. The word 'Manager' certainly appeared a lot (many times with additional information like "Manager of Information Center") as well as Director hence the larger presence of those terms, but here is what it looks like:

The three categories we most wanted to engage as part of this series were the following categories and the majority of the attendees could be bucketed into them:

Library and Information Science Professionals
We had a good number of folks joining with library and information science backgrounds. Christine and I share that background, and Dow Jones is a great supporter of info pros . We believe that Librarians have a critical role to play in the future of the semantic web. The ability to provide access to comprehensive, annotated, carefully curated data in the highly collaborative environment that is the web has never been more vital. We can’t think of a profession more suited to the task. Nor can we think of anyone in our semweb social network who doesn’t love librarians!

Information Architects
Next had information architects – user experience designers, interaction designers, taxonomists – Big IA, Little IA – however you choose to define them people who are passionate about delivering easy to use interfaces between humans and information. And the bottom line? WE NEED YOU! The semantic web presents a new paradigm for data and tools. We need creative, practical people to think about new patterns for interacting with data on the web.

Business Champions
Finally, we had the business champions – executives, analysts, program managers. You may have heard that the semantic web is a solution in search of a problem. And as we will be covering in this Series of webinars, the semantic web is a potential solution for existing problems. We’ve seen this shift before: we didn’t need email – we had fax machines to move documents quickly while maintaining a paper trail. But we are willing to bet that you wouldn’t like it if they took away your inbox (well, permanently anyway!). Business Champions are doing their organizations a disservice if they simply dismiss a semantic solution. As we discussed in the webinar, put in in the mix of options to consider; occasionally it won’t yet work, sometimes it will be a stretch, but often it will be a perfect fit.

Missed Part 1: Discover? The Slide deck is embedded below and the recorded Webinar is also available on demand .

What's next?

We are preparing for Part II [registration info coming soon]-

Send us your requirements! Your use cases! Your challenges! We’re ready and waiting!

All Posts related to this 3 part series are available under the Semantic Web Webinar Series Topic of Interest.