A case of semantics for SMEs

Small businesses need all the help that they can get, especially in these days of financial doom and gloom. So it is good to have news from the EU’s ICT Results service of another resource. Let us hope, though, that anyone who reads the item, Virtual consultancy to foster business innovation, isn’t put off by the use of the “semantics” word in the story.

The word often crops up in the context of the ’semantic web,’ a clever idea dreamed up by Sir Tim Berners Lee, sometimes described as the “inventor of the world wide web”. Unfortunately, the bright folks who are working on this concept haven’t managed to come up with a description that would mean much to the average punter. (Wikipedia has, of course, made a stab at unravelling things.) It seems to be something to do with labelling information in clever ways so that people can find them on the web.

So, when the story quotes Daniela Guarnieri, a researcher at Milan Technical University and the manager of the project as saying “Our semantics-based knowledge management platform is a kind of virtual consultancy” just skip over the “s” word and move on to the next sentence. Here Guarinieri explains that the thing “gives SMEs the chance to research their ideas, find solutions to problems and locate experts who can help them without spending too much time, effort or money”.

The story of the semantic web gets even more complicated when its advocates move on to explain what they are up to. This usually involves talks of ‘ontologies’. The ICT piece describes these as “conceptual vocabularies that give semantic information a standard meaning”.

Forget all this stuff. It is what it does that matters.  “By using semantics,” Guarnieri says, “searches return results that are more meaningful to the person doing the searching, and it also allows us to cross language and technological barriers.”

In effect, this is all about smart software. The story emphasises its value to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in eastern Europe. It writes of its as having access to a “consultant” who is “a free or low-cost software platform that can provide effective solutions by drawing on best-practice cases and international business expertise”.

Fortunately, some potential users have either understood, or ignored, the complicated terminology and have put the software through its paces. CI Zeto from Poland, they tell us “used the PIM system to find information and participate in virtual workshops on how to implement internet-based customer relationship management (CRM) solutions”.

Oh dear, there is another bit of jargon that they don’t bother to explain – PIM system. For an idea of what they mean by this, follow the link to the project’s own web site and tools. You may have trouble finding out if PIM actually stands for anything, but you can read that “The PIM idea is implemented through the development and implementation of a technological platform (the PIM Solution) and addressed to SMEs managers interested in innovating their Business Processes.”

If you persist, and go on to visit the Cordis page for the project, you will eventually learn that PIM stands for process innovation managers and that the project “aims at promoting Process Innovation within East-European SMEs through the development and validation of an ICT-based system to support innovation managers in implementing really innovative solutions in local enterprises in order to increase their organisational performance and improve their competitiveness within the enlarged market”.

Never mind. As the PIM site says, more than 100 SMEs “from East European Countries partners of the project (Check Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovenia) are involved”. Add the fact that the innovators are all “organizations, such as Association for Innovation, Incubators, Chambers of Commerce, Industrial Association, Universities and Advisory companies, that usually lead the innovation in each Country” and you have an interesting venture. Let’s just hope that the audience can make head or tail of it.