On the heels of my mini debate with Charlene Li over on her
great blog about the role of targeting based on personal behavior rules vs.
content rules (or the battle for the future of advertising 🙂
this morning the venerable Stephen Arnold’s also great blog alerted me to an
interview on Yahoo! Search Blog with Dr. Rudi Studer. All three posts are must reads if you are interested in where we are heading with web and marketing technology.
Clearly I feel much more strongly than Charlene about the role semantic technology will have in the future of advertising, thus a future predominately based on content targeting, or mashups not implicit personal data – though there is a smaller role for that. I posted about these very issues back in August with How Semantic Ad Apps Deliver Relevance to Implicit, Explicit & Latent Intent.
In light of this, the Yahoo interview with Dr. Studer caught my attention.
A full professor in Applied Informatics at University of Karlsruhe, Dr. Studer is
also director of the Karlsruhe
Service Research Institute, an interdisciplinary center designed to spur
new concepts and technologies for a services-based economy. His areas of
research include ontology
management, semantic
web services, and knowledge
management. He has been a past president of the Semantic Web Science Association and has
served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Web Semantics.
Y!: What do you think are some of the commercial
opportunities left to be explored by semantic technologies?
RS: So far, semantic technologies have been used in
commercial products for data integration, enterprise semantic search and
content management, etc. I expect this area to grow, but prospectively I see
more and more potential for business opportunities in the combination of the
social web and semantic technologies as well as in the context of mashups. An
area that is also still largely unexplored is the area of advertisements in the
context of semantic search.
I’ve often remarked that the work we have been doing this year at RAMP with
semantic technology and advertising feels like exploration. I know many discoveries await us. I’m
confident my experience in optimization and web technology will be my compass.
Lastly, to my friends at Adaptive Blue, Dapper, Inform, Peer39 and everyone else exploring performance optimization and relevance using semantic web I say good luck in 2009 and Godspeed! Many riches await us in the new world.
jonathanmendezblog.com 
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