Uche Ogbuji
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

“Enterprise 2.0.” “Enterprise mashups.” You’ve heard the new hot buzzwords. But what do they mean for the semantic web space?

I think they are a great sign. I’ve always thought that the natural first target for semantic technology is the enterprise, and not the Web at large. Let’s face it, thanks to Google and others, as I’ve pointed out in this column, the Web works very well for finding things. You may deprecate that approach to aggregation, but the simple reality is that because of the success of brute-force, regardless of merit, it will be very hard to demonstrate the fresh, added value from semantic technology on the Web.

Learn how the Semantic Web is changing the way we treat data at the LinkedData Planet Conference. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the W3C, is among the event’s keynote speakers. The author of this column is also one of the speakers.

In the enterprise it’s a different story. The Web aggregation masters obviously have not had the access to aggregate within the firewall, unless you buy their appliances, and even if you do, chances are that only a fraction of your enterprise information assets are Web-ready, and that most lie out of the reach of aggregation engines. Enter the goofy names. “Enterprise 2.0″ is about using Web 2.0 technology within the firewall to rejuvenate business applications. As I mentioned in my previous article, Web 2.0 Is Not the Enemy, because it requires the same sort of foundation on which you can build the semantic web. This holds true within the firewall as well. In order to use Web 2.0 within the enterprise, you have to first use Web architecture within the enterprise.

The new buzzwords are just another sign that the Web architecture is finally arriving in the enterprise, and I think it’s a good thing this debut occurs so late in the game. It means that enterprise data architects don’t have to rehash old, frightening lessons such as HTML 2, table-driven layout, dummy layout images, and all that awful tag soup. Well, there’s probably no completely avoiding tag soup, but the enterprise web has a pretty clean springboard. This is good because without it “enterprise mashups” would be a complete fantasy. Mashups in general should never have been anything special. The design of the Web was set for mashups right away in 1994, but all the mess of the growing Web made it difficult to combine multiple data sources. Now, thanks to Web 2.0 buzzwords, people are finally finding the will and the way to clean up their bits of the Web enough to make such recombination feasible.

Enterprise mashups — just a fancy expression for using Web architecture to integrate services and applications — are a perfect focal point for injecting Semantic technology into IT. Some of the issues that IT professionals ponder with such new ideas are: “How do I define and ensure service level for the various services being integrated, some of which might be outside the firewall?” “How do I manage security, access control, and other policy matters?” “How do I make sure that the data flow remains suitable for the integrated whole, meeting necessary constraints?” “How do I manage the lifecycle of the data, making sure it’s up to date?” “How do I express the purpose and rules for the data?” These are all rich areas for Semantic annotations.

Even though Enterprise 2.0 might be a fine vehicle for Semantic technology, those of us who work that combination have to be careful to produce more than odd trinkets and clever demos. You’ve seen what I mean on the Web. A site that maps rainfall patterns against prices of umbrellas, presented to the tune of the most popular Internet radio songs with references to the weather. A bit of fun for a while, but that’s about it.

The result of an enterprise mashup should meet all the measures for any enterprise application, starting with its origins in a properly argued business case, and following a proper software lifecycle. Most importantly, developers should take full responsibility for the output of enterprise mashups, rather than just as a throwaway merge from input A and input B. There should be a contract for the output, and proper governance. In large enterprises, mashup byproducts are not exempt from regulatory issues such as Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.

I think Semantic technology is key to turning Web toys into the next generation of IT assets. It allows you to put down rules and characteristics for the data in Web-friendly formats. And it gives you a framework for the final, most important ingredients for effective Enterprise 2.0: people and relationships. Enterprise 2.0 will be especially useful if it takes purely mechanical, inflexible applications and grows them into dynamic framework for discussion, collaboration and decision support among employees, and even partners and customers.

What you should be setting your sights on is the socially networked enterprise, which requires the flexibility of language to tie together machinery, as well as to share insights among people. Right now it’s hard to find any better way to accomplish this than Semantic Web architecture.

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