Ready For the Semantic Web?

By SemanticWeb.com on September 11, 2007 9:32 AM

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The semantic web is ready. The question is, how ready are enterprises to embrace it?

That’s something that Eric Miller, who formerly ran the W3C semantic web initiative and is now the president of semantic web startup Zepheira, thinks about a lot. His company is focused on applying semantic Web standards and knowledge management technologies to help businesses address data integration challenges. A year ago he would have told you there still was a big gap in terms of how to apply those standards effectively in a variety of critical markets.

“A lot of folks were grappling with enterprise data integration, and hadn’t either been aware of or made the connection that a lot of folks in the web community were working in this space as well,” he says. Traditional organizations viewed the web as a delivery platform for marketing or e-commerce, but not as a data architecture that can be used to empower end users and departments to help create new connections between data for specific tasks – that is, to turn collective intelligence into coordinated intelligence.

These days, when Miller talks about that, he gets at least a half-knowing nod, rather than a completely blank stare. Business executives see the application of semantic web technologies in the consumer world, where those standards are enabling applications that let users merge and morph data in new and interesting ways.

And they’re starting to realize that the semantic web standards also have applicability for more effective business intelligence, knowledge management, and decision-making, and can enable them to “provide less brittle systems with code that’s easier to maintain and much more adaptable to changing business requirements,” he says. “The thing that’s common is the realization that there isn’t one relational model or one schema or one centralized approach that solves their needs.”

So, these days the question that Miller and his team get when they meet with CIOs, CTOs, and chief architects, isn’t “What is the semantic web?’ but, “Is it ready yet?”

His answer? “It depends on what your expectations and requirements really are.”

By that, he means that the semantic web standards go a long way to addressing a lot of these companies’ requirements, and are today enabled by off-the-shelf components such as Oracle’s 10.2 database, which natively supports RDF.

“So a company may have capabilities in-house and didn’t realize it. Oracle’s just one [vendor] with a production-ready system that can be brought together to create an open platform for data management,” he says.

But other requirements call for more customized, specific kinds of solutions that can’t be met by off-the-shelf software.

“It’s not that it’s ready for prime-time in the sense of off-the-shelf technology,” Miller says, “but [it is] in reducing the cost of doing the work natively now and providing the ability to customize existing open source or existing commercial services to fit the organizational and social needs that are unique to your organization.”

But companies that are very comfortable with buying a large vendor’s software and services, and customizing it as they need to, may have a difficult time getting their mind around this idea.

On top of that, organizationally a lot of companies aren’t ready for this kind of change, Miller says.

“This really shifts in particular the social and organizational dynamics, and for companies that aren’t ready for that kind of change, these become very problematic services and offerings to deal with,” he says.

When you realize that the most knowledgeable individuals perhaps aren’t senior executives but the on-the-ground folks who keep projects together, you have a different structure that’s harder for hierarchical businesses to adapt to.

“It’s more like a web vs. a hierarchy, a web of individuals who are part of trust networks. When you look at your company through who are all the people that are web services experts, the responses aren’t hierarchical in nature,” Miller says. “They are much more dynamic, spanning different divisions, and when you start looking at organizations through those kind of glasses, if you’re not ready to look, sometimes it becomes a problem.”

So, he says, change management turns out to be an important part of semantic web service offerings, to help companies put in place the strategies to deal with this kind of knowledge creation, dissemination and exchange. And Miller says there’s real competitive advantage to be gained by those that aren’t afraid of changing to empower end users.

“The ones that treat their employees more as teams than as workers, and as collaborators rather than staff, are certainly the companies that we find that are the most receptive to these kinds of ideas,” he says. “They’re the folks who basically not just talk the talk but walk the walk when they say employees are key assets.”

Comments