Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

SAN JOSE, Calif. — A number of companies that provide the building blocks for the semantic web are announcing product upgrades this week here at the SemTech 2009 Conference.

In addition to the Thomson Reuters announcement today, TopQuadrant said that it’s adding enterprise vocabulary management to its TopBraid toolbelt.

The technology aims at addressing the controlled vocabulary problem — that’s the one where enterprises have so many different mini-controlled vocabularies among groups and individuals, often maintained in spreadsheets, that they are barely able to get the advantages that controlled vocabularies can offer in the way of providing an enterprise wide view of assets. It’s a problem that’s only likely to accelerate as enterprises move to the Web 2.0 model and the tagging systems applications like Wikis often bring to the party.

And it’s an issue that Master Data Management (MDM) systems haven’t yet resolved, says Dean Allemang, chief scientist at TopQuadrant — it takes a long time to come up with one vocabulary, and not only that, but there are good stakeholder reasons why different groups within companies use the vocabularies they do.

“A global master vocabulary means uniformizing business processes, and that is a difficult thing to do,” he says. “No particular part of an organization is motivated to move to the center, which makes a single vocabulary solution a difficult thing to do.”

TopQuadrant steps in by leveraging W3C standards to provide a global identifier for terms, exploiting how the semantic web enables linking data in a network. Rather than forcing agreement on which terms to use, all that’s needed is agreement of how to talk about these terms.

“Before you could build an application to manage vocabularies, but now you can manage them in a networked way with W3C standards,” he says. This all is inherent to the semantic web technologies on their own, but, as Allemang puts it, “there’s a lot of system stuff that has to happen there.” The new solution gives users a way to easily bring vocabularies into the network through import wizards, to link together a web of vocabularies, and places on top of that customizable facilities to access vocabularies, search using them, and edit them.

Also on tap from TopQuadrant is a free version of TopBraid Composer, which Allemang believes will be a strong contributor to the nascent cottage industry of semantic web development and adoption. With big names such as Google, Yahoo and Drupal embracing RDFa, the door is open for developers to take advantage of the capability to create applications leveraging linked data from two major search sites and millions of content sites.

But they’d have a lot easier time of it if they didn’t have to rely on complex and not always enterprise-class open source software to achieve their ends, Allemang thinks. By making available a free edition of TopBraid Composer, the semantic web modeling environment based on Eclipse that includes object-oriented rule modeling, Allemang says the price barriers to entry are removed to potential participants in this cottage industry.

The free version includes SPIN (SPARQL Inferencing Notation)l; RDFa Import; and an enterprise-class, reliable editing and querying environment. Ideally, a growing cottage industry will further move the semantic web into the mainstream, and could breed a new crop of developers that will some day move to the fee-based version of Composer.

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