Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Metadata management ranks No. 4 on Gartner’s newly released list of 10 strategic technologies for 2008. It falls just behind Green IT, unified communications, and business process modeling, as a technology “with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt,” according to the research firm.

Gartner says about metadata management that, through 2010, organizations implementing both customer data integration and product integration and product information management will link these master data management initiatives as part of an overall enterprise information management strategy.

It calls metadata management “a critical part of a company’s information infrastructure. It enables optimization, abstraction, and semantic reconciliation of metadata to support reuse, consistency, integrity, and shareability. Metadata management also extends into SOA projects with service registries and application development repositories. Metadata also plays a role in operations management with CMDB initiatives.”

Indeed, the ability to successfully manage metadata will be key to the application of semantic web technologies at the enterprise level, as organizations attempt to reconcile their disparate information sources. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) provides a way to formally describe the meaning of terminologies in web documents and the relationships between those terms. For instance, a data field in one database labelled “resume” is the same as another data field elsewhere labelled “curriculum vitae.”

“The semantic web breaks down a lot of barriers for merging data from different sources together and presenting it in a coherent and holistic way,” says Eric Miller, president of semantic web startup Zepheira, which is helping businesses address data integration challenges with semantic web standards and knowledge management technologies. “The applicability (of these technologies) inside of enterprises is potentially enormous.”

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Tools such as IBM’s Integrated Ontology Development Toolkit, for storage, manipulation, query, and inference of ontologies and corresponding instances; and TopQuadrant’s TopBraid Composer, which offers support for developing, managing, and testing configurations of knowledge models and their instance knowledge bases, are just two of the offerings out there (among a range of open source options, as well) that are addressing issues around metadata management.

Last year, webMethods also became a player in this space, with the acquisition of Cerebra’s semantic metadata management technology. (For a comprehensive listing of semantic tools for metadata management and other needs visit AI3 and a section called
Comprehensive Listing of 250 Semantic Web Tools.)

“Semantic technology provides a new kind of language to help bridge the (business and technology) gap in a fundamental way. It creates a shared vocabulary for business over the space that both business and technology people interact with, and that vocabulary becomes part of the model — the ontology — that is able to be understood by human beings and computers,” says Robert Coyne, COO at TopQuadrant. That’s important in today’s rapidly evolving business climate, he says. “The rapid business cycle requires creativity at the edge, and empowering end users to do things on their own.”

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