I travelled a lot in 2019, actually a bit more than in 2018 but stayed more in Austin. I continue to be a United 1K, for my fourth consecutive year. I flew 143, 812 miles which is equivalent to 5.8 around the earth. I was on 101 flights and spent 350 hours (~14.6 days) on a plane. I visited 13 countries (including 3 new countries): Chile, Colombia, Cuba (new), Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand (new), Paraguay (new) and Switzerland. I was on the road for a total of 142 days (~40% of the year) from which I spent 34 days in Europe, 28 days in Colombia, 18 days in Chile among others.
Given all this travel and everything I did in 2019 and everything that occurred throughout the year, I asked myself: what was my most memorable event of 2019?
In this post, I’ll focus on the the business aspect 🙂
As I mentioned in my blogpost where I announced the acquisition of Capsenta by data.world, I stated two main reasons why I was excited: perfect technical and mission/vision match. After 6 months, the reasons still hold!
My personal career aspiration is to have a cycle which starts from a basic research problem that is motivated by industry needs. However at the beginning of the cycle, the industry may not understand the importance and value of the basic research problem. Time goes by, the research matures and solutions are developed. Industry continues to evolve and eventually their problems and needs catch up to the solution that has been developed in the research. Time to commercialize! During commercialization is when you truly bridge research and industry; theory and practice (giving a talk on this topic was my most memorable event of 2018).
I started this cycle with the following basic research question: “How, and to what extent, can Relational Databases be integrated with the Semantic Web?” (see page 4 of my PhD dissertation). When I got exposed to the Semantic Web in mid 2000s, I always thought that companies would want to put “a semantic web” on top of their relational databases but they would not be able to move their data from their relational databases. Lo and behold, around 2010 we started to get knocks on our door asking about how to map relational databases to RDF graphs and OWL ontologies and that is how Capsenta started.
During commercialization, one of the many lessons I learned is that the business cares about the solutions to their problems and not necessarily the technology behind the solution. This is a mistake I see all the time: marketing and selling the technology instead of the solution. At Capsenta, we started to focus on the problem that business users are not able to answer their own questions in BI tools due to a conceptualization gap between business user’s mental model of the data and the actual physical representation of the data. We solved that problem using semantic web technologies.
With the acquisition of Capsenta by data.world, I feel that I have closed this first cycle. It took 10 years!
This cycle has been a tremendous learning experience for me. I will be writing a post about all the lessons learned through this cycle.
2020 will definitely bring a lot of exciting developments. Stay tuned!