Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Dow Jones, creator of the business semantic management tool Synaptica, this week held the first of a three-part webinar on discovering the semantic web. In addition to Christine Connors, global director of semantic technology solutions providing a lucid, plain-English discussion of just what the semantic web is, the webinar, co-hosted by Synaptica and taxonomy services business development manager Daniela Barbosa, also provided advice for how enterprises can start making their way into it.

Most of the attendees were new to the semantic web, based on the results of polls taken during the event. And most of them — nearly 70 percent — indicated that the biggest challenges to using the semantic web aren’t the technical ones, but the business-value opportunity question. Connors addressed that issue earlier in the webinar, when she acknowledged that there’s still a feeling out there that the semantic web is a solution in search of a problem.

She has a different take on that: “The semantic web is a potential solution for existing problems.” Even if we don’t know they are problems yet.

For example, there was a time when people couldn’t conceive of the notion that they needed e-mail. They thought they had their communications bases covered with phones and faxes, not recognizing the time sinks and missed opportunities that resulted from missed or delayed connections. Now imagine the disruption to business people’s world order today if they were permanently disconnected from their email inboxes.

Similarly, today there’s still a lag in recognizing the fact that all the pointing that continues to define the main way to access information on the web, still locked in its own formats, puts limits on productivity and business potential. It’s a far cry from the collection of capabilities that will inform the intelligent web, where context is added to content and the result is clearer information that recipients can trust and act upon.

So, how does an enterprise get started “semantisizng?” As Barbosa pointed out, she’s seen customers with more than 30 years of technology to deal with, maybe large SOA efforts, lots of disparate and undocumented content — and on top of that they lack the luxury of armies of tagging volunteers that the consumer world can leverage. But they shouldn’t be discouraged, because, as she put it, “you’re at the starting line and you have been in training in years.” There are skills and efforts underway in house, as well as resources on the web, that can be leveraged to their advantage.

Consider, for example, the evolutionary path of metadata that has informed previous enterprise initiatives: dictionaries and flat lists that are part of the day-to-day business on the Internet, in wikis, shared drives or wherever. Or user tags, which should be captured as they can be extremely valuable to use in social networks to build semantic relationships, she notes. Structured authority files, and taxonomies and thesauri are also very common at different levels in the modern enterprise, she said, having been driven by the need for the classification of content objects for retrieval and search, but they can be leveraged further.

“Hopefully you may have taxonomies, ontologies, folksonomies,” she noted. “You are set to pay attention to these and leverage them if you have them in house.”

The presenters discussed taking small steps to move forward, experimenting with microformats and the RDF A markup language. In other words, “Don’t sit down and learn OWL (Web Ontology Language)” as your first step, Connors said. She recommends that those starting out:

Begin with existing schema, vocabularies and datasets.

Use or transform an existing taxonomy or thesaurus.

Use, add or remove elements from an existing schema for local use.

Publicly or privately, make your work available to your intended community or you won’t get to linked data.

And engage experts — the editors who know how to build ontologies, the tech folks who understand the semantic web, and knowledge domain experts.

Don’t be hesitant to tackle the taxonomies that other special interest groups may also be working on, either. Share yours and at some point similar efforts may be combined. “If it’s meant to be a standard it will take on a life of its own,” Connors said.

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