Go to page: 1 2 

Printer Friendly Version

Dow Jones & Company lives on data. On metadata, that is -- it's been tagging content using taxonomies for decades. Careful management of metadata is the only way for the content producer and aggregator to manage the huge volumes of information it provides to consumers and enterprises. But as early adopters often find, taking the next step forward to embrace emerging technologies is a balancing act undertaken in baby steps.

Managing research and development of metadata and business champion for Synaptica, a metadata management tool, among other responsibilities, is Christine Connors, Global Director, Semantic Technology Solutions. Just recently appointed to the role, Connors explains that many of the legacy and proprietary systems Dow Jones has long used are still fairly robust.

So, "migrating to semantic web standards is about carefully selecting the projects you want to work on, making sure it will support what has come before, as well as be more extensible for the future," she says. At the upcoming Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech), being held May 18-22 in San Jose, Calif., Connors will be speaking about how a company with massive amounts of real-time data and high availability requirements migrates to the Semantic Web.

The answer is: Very carefully. "I refer to it in my head as spiral development, where you move forward and hopefully build on the last round of what you did, and spiral up until you grow," she says. " Sometimes you have to take a few steps back to get to the next level. But it's all got to be carefully planned and executed."

It's easy to get carried away with the possibilities that semantic web technologies offer to businesses -- but don't, she says. "You can't do everything at once. One of the things is that people try to jump in the deep end, and frankly, in a lot of large organizations the deep end can't scale," she says, with repercussions on availability and performance. "I would love to ask our technical people to mark up everything to ridiculous degrees, to do cool visualizations and mash-ups internally, I would love that, but it can't scale."

At the same time, you won't have a successful transition unless you make sure that you have a well-formed business case and buy-in from all levels of the organization -- from those that make the decision to pay for the technology behind the strategy to those that will have to implement it.

Go to page: 1 2 

Printer Friendly Version