Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Semantic web solutions company Zepheira is embarking upon an initiative to bring the benefits of web architecture to the enterprise. It is working on a community project dubbed Linking Enterprise Data (LED), an effort it began in order to take the basic ideas of linked open data or semantic technologies and try to put it into a form that an enterprise could easily put to use for making data available within the corporation.

The idea has roots in the Semantic Web’s Linking Open Data project, but, says Zepheira partner Uche Ogbuji, “the word ‘open’ still unfortunately scares some people in business.”

Plus, business’ interest is less about converting their cool database of proprietary data to RDF and exposing it to the masses than it is about integrating two legacy applications and perhaps mixing in a new set of data, and making it easy to change information flow depending on departmental needs. And they need to do it securely and in a policy-driven manner so that it’s traceable from an information workflow point of view for auditing and regulatory purposes.

Similarly, the idea builds on the fundamental premise of services-oriented architecture (SOA), but the problem with most of these implementations is that they fail to capture the business context of applications consistently, they don’t really capture how the services are organized to work together, and they don’t really account for the relationship between services at a macro level.

“So basically that means people implement SOA with a pre-web mindset,” says Ogbuji; there may be better descriptions of and interfaces to applications, but they are still disconnected and lack a global view of how they relate to each other, the information in them, and the people or assets involved. In contrast, the web world enables more of “an organic discovery process” to get the value you want out of an enterprise information space. LED is an attempt to recreate that in the enterprise. “Let’s align business value and business context with IT but do it using a web pattern that proved so successful at creating a unified information space that people could get what they need instead of being experts at individual destination applications,” says Ogbuji.

Ogbuji acknowledges the idea of opening up enterprise data can seem a bit frightening to IT staff that have spent their lives trying to protect data, and that’s why the LED effort has to stand a bit apart from the semantic web in general or the Linking Open Data movement. Indeed, there are rational reasons for concern, as you do need to monitor information flow in an enterprise for fiduciary or regulatory reasons, and there’s no doubt a lot of the data in a corporation’s four walls is sensitive. “Yes, you have to be careful about plugging in a credit card database to a global network; not every employee should have access to that,” he says. “This can’t be a wild west of information through efforts of improving the overall information space.”

But some other concerns — not unusual anytime a disruptive technology comes along — revolve more around issues such as IT’s feelings of ownership or even job security as application gatekeepers. So, embracing LED “has to be a calculated move by the business interests that the gain from having a unified information system outweighs the loss of autonomy and a bit of disenfranchisement of centralized IT. I would suspect that after the massive failures of ERP and the more moderate difficulties with SOA that business interests are about ready to make that gamble.”

The idea of disconnected applications and not using the integrating power of the web is making IT as a whole a bit more expensive and even more of an obstacle to the business than it needs to be, he says. “You need to make the decision of whether you want to take a fundamental change of view that information is a core business asset and should be accessed directly and in an integrated fashion.”

The Point of LED, he says, is to take care of the rational concerns and communicate to the business internally the value of not worrying too much about the irrational fears. “That’s why LED needs to lead with a discussion of policy driven information connection and dissemination. You can connect information as powerfully as the web does but make those connections policy driven,” he says.

There’s something in LED for IT, too. They may be somewhat disenfranchised, but
it also tends to empower them in other ways because now they can make rich connections between different parts of the organization’s information space, not just focus on configuring parameters for different applications. “You start to look more like an enabler,” he says.

Zepheira hopes this month to do a formal launch of the community project.

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