Betting on the Semantic Web

By SemanticWeb.com on June 8, 2009 3:49 PM

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Pricewaterhousecoopers is putting its money on data semantics, calling it the engine of engagement that will transform the enterprise data management function.

In its Spring 2009 Technology Forecast, the consulting firm offers its take on why semantic web technologies will revolutionize enterprise decision making and information sharing. One spin: When business agility demands doing away with silos and optimizing information sharing, you need a standards-based approach to wring value out of your own and others’ assets.

“PricewaterhouseCoopers believes a Web of data will develop that fully augments the document Web of today,” the report heralds, providing business with a way to take data sets from different areas — on the web or otherwise internal or external to the business — aggregate them without warehousing, and analyze the information in new and more powerful ways. The article goes on to give a very concise and comprehensive overview of semantic web standards.

But what may be of value in convincing hesitant business executives are nuggets like this one: Relational data models are sucking up precious IT resources that should be focused elsewhere. Enterprises today need a higher-level of integration than ever before — they must foster many-to-many sharing of data with easier connections to more sources.

Consider the effort and labor that goes into facilitating custom-built connections among siloed databases and data models that have not been designed for reuse by others. Consider the fact that some IT departments are consumed with data-warehousing reporting demands, when business users should be able to handle that themselves, the report notes. That’s got to give pause to some business leaders — can they continue to afford that approach in today’s challenging economic environment?

In another article in Pricewaterhousecoopers report, this point is also raised: Even if you could expend all your IT energy and resources on coming up with what you think users would ever require in terms of connected data sets, you’d be missing the boat, and that’s a problem for business intelligence efforts that are so critical to driving corporate initiatives.

“Because the utility of any source changes over time, even if you could integrate all the data you thought were useful into your analytics systems, there would be many you didn’t identify that users would want,” the report notes. “You don’t want to create a haystack just because someone might want a specific straw at some point.”

Rather, it notes, the CIO has to create a framework for exploration, an architecture to accommodate many sources of data and new types of data — and that’s why CIOs need to “begin to rethink their information strategy with the Linked Data approach in mind.”

At the same time, there’s a recognition in the first article of the real obstacles to be tackled here. Take, for example, the fact that the claims for relational databases twenty years ago “were comparable to claims made now for the Semantic Web – the scale was just smaller.” That could easily make a skeptic smirk that semantic web approaches are not better, just different. And the cultural issues that keep data in silos are no small problem, even as the need for not just intra- but inter-organizational collaboration grows.

“The balance needs to shift toward collaboration, but companies aren’t accustomed to sharing data at Web scale and to treating data any differently from the way it’s been treated previously,” the report states.

So what to do? A key recommendation here: start small on the projects side, opening the door to tapping Web data resources so people can get an idea of the potential that lies therein.

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