Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Want to understand how the semantic web applies to the enterprise arena? To get some new insight into this, Semanticweb.com recently caught up via email with Prof. Adrian Paschke, who heads up the Corporate Semantic Web project at the Free University of Berlin. The project, already started and will continue over the next few years, seeks to demonstrate how semantic web technologies will be realized in the context of corporate requirements.

The project has already published its first milestone report, available here, and plans to disclose additional information in the next few months about the projects it already has in the works.

Semanticweb.com: What was the reason for the initiation of this project last February?

Paschke: There has been intense research and development in Semantic Web technologies in the last years. Since 2004 there exists a relatively stable core of W3C standards with RDF, RDFS and OWL. Recently, the Semantic Web stack was extended by the RDF query language SPARQL and the W3C Rule Interchange Format (W3C RIF). A large number of tools, software and applications already exist in the public (Semantic) Web and first commercial services are available. Nevertheless, it is still an early technology. There are still gaps in the standards and implementations and the vision of a global machine-understandable Semantic Web will not be fulfilled in the near future due to the high requirements with respect to scalability, security, critical mass of adopters, users, and semantic data on the public Web. While the vision of a global Semantic Web remains unfulfilled in the next years, the Corporate Semantic Web approach focuses on controlled environments where these issues do not arise. Current Semantic Web tools and standards are already adequate to implement components of such Corporate Semantic Webs.

The high potential in many industrial application scenarios and the short-term practicability in closed enterprise settings was the reason to initiate the funded Corporate Semantic Web project and start a new chair addressing this topic at the Free University Berlin. Furthermore, one important long-term goal of Corporate Semantic Web research of the new working group is to widen this focus in the course of time, to develop solutions that scale to a global range, and thereby contribute to the development of the global Semantic Web.

Semanticweb.com: Why is it important to, as the web site about this project notes, establish economically beneficial adoption of Semantic Web technologies in corporate environments?

Paschke: The transition from manufacturing to information economies and the progressive globalization of markets pose new challenges to enterprises. The amount of information that companies have to produce, acquire, maintain, propagate, and use has increased dramatically over the last decades.

Nowadays, companies seek more capable approaches for gaining, managing, and utilizing knowledge, and the Semantic Web offers promising solutions. While the global Semantic Web remains an unfulfilled vision for the present, the Corporate Semantic Web idea aims at bringing semantic technologies to enterprises. The expected results are an advantage in competition for enterprises using semantic technologies. However, the Semantic Web technology has not arrived in the corporate world, yet. Incentives need to be provided to encourage in-house adoption and integration of these new Corporate Semantic Web technologies into the existing IT infrastructures, services and business processes. Decision makers on the operation, tactical and strategic IT management level need to understand the impact of this new technological approach and its adoption costs and return on investment.

Therefore, companies will have in mind the economical justifiability of the deployment of new technologies. One of the next steps in the Corporate Semantic Web project will be to develop methods for cost estimation of ontology development processes, ontology use, and ontology maintenance that are adaptable to different corporate environments.

Furthermore, methods for evaluating existing ontologies with regard to enterprise relevant usage criteria are needed. Early adopters deploying application-oriented solutions for improving their competitive advantages through enhanced knowledge management of semantically rich data will demonstrate incentives for further corporations to follow and thereby accelerate the realization of a global Semantic Web.

Semanticweb.com: Where do you foresee semantic web technologies having their greatest impact in the corporate world?

Paschke: There two major application domains:

1. Automated Semantic Business Processes

The assumption behind Business Process Management (BPM) is that the uniqueness of an enterprise lies in the way how it manages and executes its business processes. Accordingly, business processes are the most valuable asset of an enterprise. Modern BPM often directly builds upon IT Governance as a strategic instrument of the enterprise business strategy, IT Service Management (ITSM) which describes the change of information technology (IT) towards service and customer orientation, and IT Infrastructure Management

(ITIM) which focuses on planning and efficient and effective delivering of IT services and products while meeting quality of service and security requirements. To bridge between this technical IT service view and the business processes, and allow the involvement of humans in these automated processes, Corporate Semantic Web (CSW) technologies provide scalable methods and tools for the machine-readable and human-usable representation of knowledge, especially rules as a means of declaratively describing business rules and IT policies, and ontologies as a means of capturing a domain of discourse such as a business vocabulary which, for example, might be used in modeling business processes or in implementing Semantic Web Services (SWS) for Service Oriented Computing (SOC).

2. Knowledge Management tools

In particular in the realm of corporate collaboration tools, Semantic Web technologies will support semi-automatic knowledge evolution and dynamic access to and integration of distributed, heterogeneous information sources and knowledge consolidation — for example, for trend, enterprise structure, and problem recognition. This will enable the mapping from corporate data and human expert information into explicit knowledge and finally into corporate wisdom.

Semanticweb.com: We understand the research focuses on three main areas: Corporate semantic search, corporate semantic collaboration, and corporate ontology engineering.
How do these three areas tie together in terms of creating a more competitive business thanks to the semantic web?

Paschke: Corporate ontology engineering will improve the facilitation of agile ontology engineering to lessen the costs of ontology development and, especially, maintenance. Corporate semantic collaboration focuses the human-centered aspects of knowledge management in corporate contexts.

Corporate semantic search is settled on the highest application level of the three research areas and at that point it is a representative for applications working on and with the appropriately represented and delivered background knowledge. All three parts work together in an integrative Corporate Semantic Web life cycle loop where (1) semantic information is extracted from the existing corporate data (Semantic Search), (2) semantic knowledge such as corporate ontologies or business rules are engineered from this information and semantic-enriched information objects are created (Semantic engineering), and (3) used in collaborative processes and in knowledge-intensive decisions (Semantic Collaboration). These collaborative processes are again semantically analyzed to produce further information bits and in a new loop (1-2-3) are, for example, used to personalize the search and collaboration context.

Semanticweb.com: And how is the research you are or plan to undertake in these areas differentiated from how semantic search, collaboration and ontologies are being studied in their relation to consumer-driven activities?

Paschke: Corporate Semantic Web has two intended meanings for us:

1. (Collaborative) workflows, communication and knowledge management based on an infrastructure for enterprise networks which uses Semantic Web technologies.

2. Corporate = entrepreneurial usages of Semantic Web technologies

Corporate Semantic Web addresses both the consumer and the producer side, where consumers and producers might be humans as well as automated services, for example, in business processes and enterprise service networks. This also includes the adequate engineering, modeling, negotiation and controlling of the use of the (meta)data and meaning representations in a (collaborating) community of users or services in enterprise settings where the individual meanings as elements of the internal cognitive structures of the members become attuned to each others’ view in a communicative process. This allows dealing with issues like ambiguity of information and semantic choices, relevance of information, information overload, information hiding and strategic information selection, as well as positive and negative consequences of actions (for example, in a decision making process).

But, CSW does not only address the technological aspect but also the pragmatic aspect of actually using Semantic Web technologies in enterprises, which includes learning and training aspects as well as economical considerations.

Semanticweb.com: As we understand it there is also a focus here on modern Web-technologies and enterprise service technologies, corporate information systems, and business process management with corporate Semantic Web, ontology engineering, semantic search and collaborative applications? Can you provide a high level explanation of why all of these technologies and knowledge must merge with semantics to enable successful adoption of semantic web technologies in corporate environments?

Paschke: While technologies and tools that help collaborating and structuring content, such as tagging, wikis, blogs, and collaboration platforms as well as tools for managing and running larger enterprise software and services are in place, companies seek more capable approaches for gaining, managing, and utilizing knowledge required for their adaptive business processes and dynamic enterprise service networks. Often the integration of data and human activities in automated (business) processes / services is purely functional.

That is, there is a semantic gap between these two worlds (human / knowledge vs. automated services and processes). Semantic Web technologies allow discovering and transforming existing information into relevant knowledge of practical consequences, trigger automated reactions according to occurred complex events/situations, and derive answers, for example, for decision making to queries from the existing syntactic and semantic information resources. Hence, these technologies are means to bridge between different existing enterprise technologies, Web X.0 technologies as well as between the humans (employees, decision makers etc.) and IT services in enterprises.

Semanticweb.com: We understand the project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the BMBF Innovation Initiative for the New German Länder – Entrepreneurial Regions. Why was a project such as this on their radar screen, so to speak?

Paschke: The main goal of this funding program is to transfer valuable knowledge and results from research into industry. In Berlin there are many small and medium sized enterprises which have an urgent need for Semantic Web technologies to solve their business problems, and which have a need for trained Semantic Web experts. The new CSW working group offers both, knowledge exchange through cooperation with business enterprises, and training of Master and PhD students in the Free University of Berlin as well as training of employees in Semantic Web meetups and special learning courses.

Semanticweb.com: A question about timing — can you speak to the thought behind this being a six year project? Is the thinking that we are still close to a decade off before businesses really begin to adopt semantic web technologies — or even really begin closely considering them?

Paschke: We are already in the phase where industry partially begins to consider semantic web technologies. The original problem of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) approach was that it was too formal and tailored tools for business users were missing. But, this has changed in the last years; Semantic Web tools are much more usable and mature now.

Nevertheless, industry will not adopt the Semantic Web as stand-alone technologies, but it is looking for generic enterprise solutions, which integrate the Semantic Web technologies in an easy way in their existing IT infrastructures, services and processes.
This already happens, for example, in combinations of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies such as semantic Wiki systems, or semantic business rules and semantic business process management solutions. Semantic Web enabled enterprise tools are a relevant market.

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