The interviews with Cirrus Shakeri about semantics at SAP and the one with Matthias Kaiser about the relevance of semantics in software ("why apple computers don't taste sweet") gave you hopefully a rough idea what semantics are.
In this blog I want to talk about an SAP project called "FindGrid" that addresses some of the concepts that Cirrus and Matthias talked about in their interviews like self learning machines.
A few questions beforehand. Have you ever conducted research work related to markets, products or customers? And if so, have you ever wished
- when you came on to existing and similar work of others, all of the knowledge and insights were easily accessible and conveniently stored in one place?
- you could synthesize knowledge to create credible and reliable knowledge assets e.g. as basis for decision making?
- you could easily access key information that is likely only sitting on unknown sources somewhere?
FindGrid can help you on these taks.
FindGrid is a software to "build organizational memory via a collaborative, self-learning environment that enables knowledge capture across people, teams and enterprises". In other words this software learns constantly which knowledge is available in your company and connects it with relevant processes, roles, teams and individuals. How cool is that?
This software is available as Solution in Early-Adoption Phase, currently rolled out at Colgate-Palmolive’s Market Researchers und in pilot stage at Fujitsu, Kaeser and other SAP customers and their feedback is rolled into the next version which is planned to available as a standard product by end of 2011.
To get an introduction to the solution concept and to see this software in action you can watch the following three videos:
The Story of FindGrid
Introduction to FindGrid
An application demo with the use case "Review SAP Brand Performance"
I'm planning to interview Stephan Brand, Vice President of Corporate Functions Platform, soon. Stephan worked together with Archim Heimann (Chief Architect for Semantic Business Applications) and colleagues from SAP's Technology Innovation Platform (TIP) to implement semantic concepts into software solving requirements in the day-to-day enterprise-work.
Stephan will share, how SAP can solve real business issues by leveraging the capabilities of semantic technologies in a very pragmatic, end-user and solution-oriented way. Also, we will discuss how SAP could use a semantic framework to bring the power of semantics to a broader variety of users and applications.
So stay tuned and watch the Technology Innovation page on SDN for news around semantics and other technology topics at SAP.
