Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Oracle is pushing hard on the application of semantic technologies to enterprise business problems. bITa Planet recently caught up with Robert Shimp, vice president of Oracle’s global technology business unit, to discuss what problems Oracle believes semantic technologies can solve for customers — and how.

bITa Planet: How does Oracle support semantic technologies?

Shimp: Today we not only support the core data standards for the semantic web inside our database, but our application integration architecture, or AIA, offering uses semantic technology. We are already shipping that capability today as an integration capability for our applications. You’ll see more and more semantic technologies weaving its way into products as we go along.

We have a fundamental advantage in that with enterprise applications, you know an awful lot about the business process going on, the people that are using it, and so on, and that means the application can have a lot of metadata that it knows about what’s going on. The fact that we can store that metadata inside the database means we can provide far richer transactions and business processes for customers. It’s that ability to provide both the applications and the database that gives us that advantage.

How did Oracle get out in front on the semantic technology?

Oracle is the leading supplier of database technology for geographic information systems. We’ve been doing that for at least a decade or more. It turns out that maps or geographic information systems use a mathematical model called a network model. In other words, basically a map is all about different points and locations and the distance between points. It turns out that semantic technology uses exactly the same mathematical model to represent the links between concepts and ideas. So as we developed GIS technology over the years, it was relatively easy for the same development team to supply this same technology for semantic technology purposes.

Among the first companies Oracle worked with that were interested in applying semantic technologies to their business problems were those in the pharmaceuticals industry and government. How is the make-up of companies interested in this changing?

We’re now seeing lots of customers in different areas – financial services, pharmaceuticals companies, large manufacturers in the airplane or automotive industries – using semantic technologies for many different enterprise purposes. It boils down to having lots of data sources to reconcile information, like parts numbers to understand real time data flows, or obscure proteins in the drug discovery process. Semantic technology is very powerful for creating inferences about data and organizing the information in new and interesting ways.

The two main business problems that mainstream types of companies deal with are having lots of sources of customer names and addresses and trying to reconcile them out of their CRM and support systems and order processing systems — who is the customer and ensuring I have one customer record. That’s a very typical example. There are multiple databases of sources that were never designed to work together but you must be able to pull data out of them and rationalize the information. Traditionally that’s been done using ETL technologies and data hubs and data warehousing technologies.

The other common business problem is parts – lots of parts and suppliers, with different numbers even if they’re very similar. Trying to keep track of what’s what and what you can order from someone is very complicated. Semantic technology lets you say this part from supplier one is equivalent to this part from the other supplier.

There are even bigger possibilities for semantic technology. Think about business intelligence … What if BI tools could tap into existing data and provide you intelligence in real time. There are huge opportunities there to increase the value of your IT.

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bITa Planet: Any danger that the openness of data enabled by semantic technologies poses to your business?

Shimp: I think that the more the customers get value from the information, the more they are going to value their information systems, and that can only be good for Oracle. In the end we want to ensure that business can get tremendous value out of their IT systems and we’ll do just fine as a company.

And Oracle by its very nature is an innovator. We are very focused on building our business around innovation. There are a number of others who may in fact see this technology as a threat to their existing business models. If they want to spot us a two or three year lead in the market, we’ll take it.

What about tagging data – isn’t there a risk of human error or laziness that could interfere with what semantic technologies are trying to accomplish?

There are two different ways that data can get tagged. One is people in their day to day work sit there and tag things and there’s some risk I may classify data in one way and you would say it’s wrong and tag it another way. That’s potentially an issue but there’s also a richness to that in that we may give data different meanings and can build ontologies that relate those relationships — that is a positive.

But setting that aside, one of the huge advantages for the application vendors like Oracle or its competitors is that we can automatically tag the data with high accuracy. So a Siebel CRM system — when a user logs in to order something in an online store, this application itself automatically knows who that customer is, the business process they use, the context and can automatically tag all the data in that transaction accurately and consistently.

Imagine if you offer ERP, supply chain and everything under the sun, every business process inside the organization and among suppliers, partners and customers can be automatically tagged with consistent, relevant metadata and stored in a database where you can have very rich control and create exciting new applications on your own.

We think at Oracle that there’s an opportunity here to automatically tag a huge proportion of all the data in the enterprise through the business systems. It wouldn’t be required for people to do the tagging, which you can’t count on anyway. People are busy – there’s no time to do it or they erroneously tag things. So any system that fundamentally depends on people tagging stuff within the enterprise is probably a flawed proposition… And there’s a huge distinction in my mind between the semantic web, which is consumer oriented and where there is the human tagging issue, than semantic technologies in the enterprise, where it is a more constrained problem. There are a set of known business processes and ways for people to interact with systems.

Where is this all heading?

There are three sort of megatrends going on in the data center right now. One is SOA in particular for applications, that enables you to essentially break apart monolithic applications and combine them as services.

But the second big trend then is to decouple the data from the application or the application services, so that in that sense what you can do is write your application or create services independent of the data sources they have to deal with, which comes full circle back to having a virtual layer between application services and data. The application can go out and find whatever data sources are best to use for that particular question. That’s what semantic technology provides for enterprise information management.

The third piece is grid computing to provide the underlying utility capacity. As you have a SOA-based application and these virtualized data sources, no matter what type of workload you are generating you have the computing capacity to deliver on that.

All three pieces are coming together after decades of effort on the part of the computer industry to create a totally new generation of IT. It’s something we’ve been approaching as an industry for a long time, where we are reaching the time where the pieces are converging.

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