Ontology-Based Linking of Social, Open, and Enterprise Data for Business Intelligence

We are at the cusp of two major revolutions impacting the world of work and commerce. These are the rise of social media and the rise of Big Data. Data is everywhere. Each phone call, email, chat request, or person-to-person interaction between a customer and a brand provides organisations with invaluable information. This wealth of data can yield valuable information, such as revealing precious insight into customers’ needs and desires, allowing companies to personalise their services accordingly. A business revolves around its customers and their social connections. These social connections are valuable data that can useful for enterprises. For a company to thrive in this new world, these data need to be used to identify opportunities in new sectors, support employees, customers, and other external partners. These data can also be used to create a more intelligent understanding of customers, and to help predict future customer behaviour. This paper (and talk) will describe how we apply Linked Data to enable BT, in particular BT Business (BTB), a division of BT, to take advantage of this Data revolution. We use Linked Data technology to integrate internal and external datasets, including structured, unstructured, and social data. We describe (and shall expand on these in the talk) how this integration allows new and insightful information to be derived. BTB, the UK’s leading provider of business communications services with over one million small and medium sized enterprise customers, would especially like to use Linked Data to solve these business challenges (amongst others):