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7 August 2007
Dana Gardner and friends explore the Semantic Web
Posted by Paul Miller at August 7, 2007 03:13 PM
Driving home last week, I listened to the latest of Dana Gardner's BriefingsDirect podcasts; SOA Insights Analysts on Semantic Web, Adobe and Open Source Flex, and Future of UDDI.
Although only released last Monday, the podcast was recorded back in April. An edited transcript is also available.
For the first thirty minutes or so of the conversation, Dana and guests Joe McKendrick, Jim Kobielus, Dave Linthicum and Todd Biske talked around the notion of the Semantic Web, particularly from an enterprise-focussed viewpoint.
As Dana outlines in his introduction (quotes drawn from the transcript),
“We’re going to be digging into a few topics today. The first, the Semantic Web. We’ve heard quite a bit about Web 2.0+, perhaps even Web 3.0, the whole notion of a more intelligent web, something that provides things in an automated fashion with some intelligence. Of course, there is going to be more than one definition of Semantic Web, and we are going to dig into that too.”
“This [topic] was brought up by Jim Kobielus, the whole notion of Semantic Web. It’s been perking up on the radar and showing up in a lot of different places. We wanted to see if there’s anything new going on and if there’s any convergence with what we refer to as Web 2.0 and even Enterprise 2.0.”
It's interesting to listen to Dana's guests talking around their perceptions of the Semantic Web. They clearly perceive its value as initially lying inside the individual enterprise, as this quote (and others) show;
“[Dana] Gardner: Jim, this is stuff that's being done inside the firewall and primarily on premises and within enterprises, right?
[Jim] Kobielus: Yeah, primarily it’s being done within enterprises, but to varying degrees it’s being done across B2B environments as well, where you have diverse data on your ERP system. You have your line-of-business apps, transactional databases, web sources, and so on, and you’re not consolidating that data into a data warehouse. Rather, you're leaving all that data in the source repositories and dynamically mapping it to composite, unified views. What I am getting at is that there are a lot of vendors of these EII products that provide a semantic layer. Probably, the most widely used is Business Objects. They call it ”Universe“ capability. So, to some degree, this sounds like the Semantic Web.
Gardner: Now, hold on. Shouldn’t we again go to that point? Shouldn’t we call it the Semantic Intranet? It’s not really Web. It’s not standard. It’s not taking information off the Web. This is usually data and information that’s within the confines and control of the organization.”
I can certainly see value in leveraging semantic technologies within the individual enterprise, and that is indeed where we're seeing many of the early semantically enhanced products breaking out of the research labs of our universities and corporations.
A significant part of the value that we at Talis perceive, though, is in working with data holders to get their data (or some aggregate of the more sensitive stuff) out from behind that firewall and available for manipulation and enrichment within, between, across and amongst diverse silos with the help of the Talis Platform. Writing recently in our latest white paper [pdf], Justin Leavesley and Ian Davis highlight some of the opportunities; opportunities that do not require the 'ocean boiling' to which Jim refers on the podcast.
“The Talis Platform harnesses this wave of sophisticated mass collaboration by semantically connecting the activities of individuals and organisations. Although built on core Semantic Web technologies the Platform hides this complexity from those building on it. Individuals, companies or governments do not need to become experts in Semantic Web technologies to wield its power, just as there is no need to understand HTML or PHP to write a blog, putting the power of the Semantic Web into the hands of millions.
Driven by a vision of the convergence of social, technical and economic waves of disruption, Talis have created an environment for building next generation applications. The Talis Platform enables innovative applications that learn from and assist their users to be created by any software developer. We seek to be successful by enabling development partners worldwide to use the Talis Platform to create successful products and services that delight and excite their users in every field of endeavour.”
Key to this is, of course, finding means to integrate painlessly with the legacy systems already at work within likely partners for the Platform, and that's where this podcast series' wider theme of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) comes into play through the provision of light-weight - probably Open - adapters capable of deployment inside the individual enterprise. These facilitate communication between local legacy systems and the network capabilities of the wider Platform, and we're already seeing a first generation of these adapters getting down to work in one of the Platform's early markets with Talis Keystone.
The Semantic Web's potential - as with the Web-Web - lies in reaching far beyond an individual organisation's intranet. To do this, we do not need to agonise for decades over the one true ontology. We also don't need universal buy-in and adoption from the outset. What we need are specific use cases and enabling technology, and we at Talis welcome approaches to talk about either or both.
Technorati Tags: BriefingsDirect, Dana Gardner, Linked Data, open data, Podcasting, Semantic Web, SOA, Talis, Talis Platform, W3C, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, web services
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Comments
Thanks for the link and comments. Ya, we did this in April. My ability to produce these lags a bit. Still trying to catch up!
Posted by: Dana Gardner at August 7, 2007 03:46 PM
