Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The way to enterprise adoption of semantic technology is to bake it into the platform. That’s the thinking of webMethods, the business line of Software AG that acquired semantic metadata management vendor Cerebra last year.

The first fruits of that acquisition, the embedding of Cerebra’s technology into the webMethods Fabric product suite, became generally available recently. The product portfolio includes capabilities for business integration, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and business process management (BPM).

“We do talk a lot about semantic technologies and let them know it’s in there,” says Susan Ganeshan, SVP of product management and product marketing. “But they don’t need to know the semantic technology is in there to get the great business benefits from it.”

Those benefits include the discovery of assets, performing impact analysis between assets so that people can make better decisions on change management processes, and visualization of infrastructure eco-systems. From a business process management perspective, it can solve the challenge of helping business user teams know the capabilities of assets, and find them so that they can be reused to build new composite applications.

“It sounds simple, but it hasn’t been available to people prior to now, and it has been a big inhibition to adoption of SOA, and leveraging SOA with BPM,” says Mike Lees, one of the founders of Cerebra and now director of product marketing for the process applications group at Software AG. “Prior to this kind of technology people put things in a bucket and called it a repository, but it didn’t really provide anything that helps people find things. UDDI is great but doesn’t give a rich definition of what’s contained and how those things relate to each other. This lets you be more prescriptive and productive as to how people interact with those assets.”

Cerebra was founded in 2001, based on technology developed at the University of Manchester. But it was only in the months preceding its acquisition by webMethods that it began focusing on applying semantic technologies to service-oriented architecture assets and application infrastructure assets, says Lees. “The webMethods acquisition focused us further on how we use this technology to formalize how assets within complex IT architectures relate to each other, the dependencies between them, and how to better describe them to improve discovery,” he says.

Brian Crook, one of the Cerebra principals who is now VP of product development at the webMethods business unit of Software AG, focusing on metadata management, says that Cerebra had a difficult time in its first few years as a company selling tools built around RDF and OWL to facilitate modeling and integration into various different systems.

“It’s largely revolutionary vs. evolutionary. It’s esoteric, difficult to learn, and not an extension of what traditional enterprise engineers have been doing, so it’s hard to get adoption. We didn’t do a good job of greasing the skids for adoption in the enterprise market. So when we were acquired the driver was to hide the differentiating technology away from our users.”

Today, the Fabric product suite ships with a set of ontologies that describe the enterprise architecture and infrastructure that provides automatic extraction of assets, the business process’ relationship to a service, and search, and requires very little modeling by developers.

“The challenge we always faced, and still don’t see anyone solving it the way Software AG and webMethods are, is that the ontologies come with the product,” says Lees. “We are not supplying a tool that lets a business user or even IT user to sit down and build or change these knowledge models. That’s always been a big challenge.” Because building an ontology is really hard, webMethods says it’s taken the pragmatic approach, shipping a domain model that gives companies value in the short term and then enables webMethods to help them leverage other tools, like business process management or development tools, to extend and build on these knowledge models.

Customers, says Ganeshan, are excited by the fact that something relatively technical, such as semantic technologies, are built into the platform. It means they don’t need PhDs to figure out which processes use a service or work for months to figure out what the downstream effects of changes to metadata will be on the business, because it’s all captured in the semantic library and surfaced in an easy-to-digest way. “It’s not just a written list of all relationships but a visual list,” she says. “All of that work just really kind of emphasizes the business value that semantic technologies can bring to ease of use within a business.”

Semantic technologies will become commonplace, but not mainstream in the same way that relational databases are, Crooks says. “I expect it will manifest in an evolutionary way, in the tools that people have already, but be a core kernel that remains hidden away.”

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