Semantic Web’s Linux Parallel

By SemanticWeb.com on October 9, 2007 3:40 PM

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Is the semantic web following the Linux playbook? In some ways, maybe.

The reference here is mainly to the fact that many enterprises were hesitant to adopt Linux as a platform for mission-critical applications, when their main option for service and support was the volunteer open-source community. Not to fault the open-source community, which has a reputation for helpfulness and responsiveness, but businesses tend to feel more secure putting their trust in contracts for specified services.

It was the commercialization of Linux distributions — which offered product support, training, and other services as well as affiliated infrastructure and systems management products — that opened the door to more mainstream and mission-critical deployments of the operating system. That model has been followed with some success by commercial open source applications, such as SugarCRM.

“There are a lot of parallels and anti-parallels to the Linux story,” says Dean Allemang, chief scientist at TopQuadrant, a semantic web consulting company and creator of the semantic web development tool TopBraid Composer, and the semantic application deployment environment. TopBraid Ensemble, a semantic application for collaborative information management, runs on TopBraid Live. It mirrors the Linux story in the issues that surround building trust around a new-fangled idea. It’s the old chicken-and-egg scenario: one way to gain trust is by demonstrating mission-critical solutions, which no one will build until they feel they can trust the environment and building platforms.

TopQuadrant is among the early set of companies helping to build that trust. The company counts among its employees VP of product development Holger Knublauch, Ph.D, who created the leading open source ontology development tool Protégé OWL while he was a researcher at Stanford University. Built in the early 90s, the tool so far has some 50,000 downloads to its credit, TopQuadrant says. But it wasn’t designed with support for the new W3C standards, and the open source system wasn’t up to managing industrial strength projects, TopQuadrant says.

“People wanted a commercially supported version of the ontology editing environment they were accustomed to,” says Allemang, that supported the new standards. Hence, the signing-on of Knublauch and the birth of TopBraid Composer, which has been available for about the last year and a half. Because of its heritage, TopQuadrant says it’s an easy upgrade path for users from Protégé to TopBraid Composer.

The TopBraid suite aims to break one of the barriers to widespread adoption of semantic web technologies — the lack, COO Robert Coyne says, of “an enterprise-class development and deployment environment to deploy scalable semantic applications.” What this technology enables, he says, is “model-based applications and the model-based deployment of systems for business solutions, where the models are living things that have explicit meaning encoded in them. They can be queried and they can evolve.” In other words, you can change what the application does by changing the model, not rewriting a program.

According to TopBraid, there’s an explosion of interest in where the semantic web can take the enterprise, and questions about how to make it all work. Organizations are becoming very interested in getting base training on what the semantic web is all about, and the standards around it, from the company, it says.

“They see this as exciting, but when they decide to do a deployment, it’s a tough situation,” says Allemang. “They have to figure out all the pieces of it. There’s a lot of good GPL software out there, but how does it fit in, what do I have to build myself for my specific requirements and how? That’s quite a daunting decision and it keeps a lot of people from going to genuinely high-profile deployments.”

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