My interview by JupiterMedia back in May is below. The original article can be found at http://www.semanticweb.com/article.php/3749916.

The ‘Digital Human’ and the Semantic Web
May 29, 2008
By Jennifer Zaino

No doubt about it, the technology behind the semantic web is truly disruptive. The challenge for companies will be to figure out how to provide applications based on it that match business drivers and meet business goals. Oh, and those applications had better account for the fact that understanding the “digital” human component — within and without organizations — is critical to those ends.

“With a disruptive technology such as the semantic web, there’s a need to really talk about the current state of how we develop semantic technologies and applications,” says Dr. Rachel Yager, director of semantic web company Machintas Inc., which is developing technologies to enable people to better represent themselves in their digital lives. “Not small-scale stuff, but large, enterprise-strength applications.”

In a presentation to be delivered at the LinkedData Planet conference taking place June 17 and 18 in New York, she’ll be doing just that, in a discussion that explores the challenges and approaches for effective semantic systems development. “In the software development lifecycle, what are the best approaches and processes and methodologies that one can use to start looking into semantic applications, and to cater to the evolving technologies in this exciting domain,” Yager says.

Indeed, the semantic web community is vibrant … and at a crossroads in terms of making this disruptive technology viable, says Yager.

“I really think that when we are dealing with the semantic technologies of today, there are some positions that a company can take for the future to better harness the evolving nature of this technology,” she says.

Semantic web technologies can help close the gaps that still exist in IT environments in terms of scalability, flexibility, and agility, and companies can take advantage of that to develop enterprise-class systems that can uncover and exploit the linkages among people, their own understanding of concepts, other data sets, and mass intelligence.

Don’t underestimate how important it is to consider the people part of the link. Human beings and their digital lives are now part of the web fabric, says Yager, and the line between the real and the virtual human is growing increasingly fuzzy. “The human person is part of the link, of the linked data planet — in fact, the most important link,” she says. “We’re in pursuit of flexibility in the name of building agile software for connecting better with people, representing people better in this linked data planet –that is needed.” Human relationships need to be understood to meet business objectives, she says.

For example, a business’ core assets are its employees, and the knowledge that is linked to those people, individually and as part of the collective intelligence, is critical to fulfilling enterprise missions.

“What distinguishes one company from another is the culture and the people and how they make things work,” says Yager. “The representation of people and the understanding of people and linking all that information — we now have a powerful and new way that we can have a richer representation of ourselves in the data on the web. And companies have to care about that, because their employees are going to be part of that.” The same is true about leveraging that understanding on the customer front. “There will be a stage when humans are the content,” Yager says.

Machintas, with its expertise in computational intelligence, is headed in the direction of helping companies understand the human part of the equation, by developing technologies that enable one to represent himself better in his digital life. It aims to bridge the gap between the way a computer and human can think, and to better link the human to the computer. Among the technologies it is working on to achieve these ends is adding a new dimension to semantics, in the area of granular computing. Granular computing, Yager says, is a confluence of technologies, including “fuzzy sets,” that allow someone to represent rich human concepts in a formal way in the computer. That’s a challenge, as concepts such as young and old, rich and poor and even risk, can mean something very different to different people.