What the Semantic Web Means For Your Business

Kingsley Idehen, founder and CEO of OpenLink Software, has some interesting thoughts on this question. His company makes Virtuoso, technology that allows enterprises or individuals to take their existing data -- whether in XML, SWL, Web Services, HTML or other formats -- and convert it on-the-fly to structured data. With the software in place, organizations can expose the data from all these sources as structured data using RDF (the Resource Description Framework), the general framework for describing a site’s metadata. Virtuoso is also a database that supports SPARQL, the query language of the semantic data web, for getting access to billions of interlocked items of data.

Jupitermedia recently talked with Idehen about how the semantic web changes everything.

Q: Why should enterprises care about the semantic web?

Idehen: Bill Gates touted the idea many years ago of having information at your fingertips, being a mouse click away from relevant information. But in reality you were kind of able to get to relevant information if you were ready to be locked into a report writing or business intelligence tool. Often that would lock you into an operating system or a database, which meant there was never really any chance in hell of being able to truly do this — that, say, if I receive an email, or have a conversation, that I could find all relevant information about that customer or a competitor just one click away. Then the web came and you were kind of one click away from a document that was to some degree related [to the information you were looking for].

But for corporate information being at your fingertips, that has been mercurial or mirage-like in nature at best. What the semantic data web allows is to genuinely create a so-called 360-degree view of the enterprise so all relevant data in the enterprise is one click away. You will have a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) that identifies every customer, a URI that identifies every product in your product portfolio, a URI for every employee, a URI for every piece of doc they produce. All that means is that the systems in the enterprise -- whether CRM, accounting, marketing, distributed collaborative applications, blog systems -- all the data produced during these activities will have URIs so that individual pieces of data begin the drill-down process between that item of data and all related data.

A Typical scenario -- a new employee gets email from an established customer who they are unaware of, maybe AT&T. It would it be nice if they simply clicked on AT&T and could learn that this was an important customer, the last transaction was this amount, and so on. That is an example of AT&T as the customer of the company having one URI, and because they are exploiting semantic web technologies all the data about AT&T is already in linked form. So that by clicking on the URI of AT&T you can see how many support cases there were, what the last kind of communications with AT&T were about, what are its latest financials.

Q: But isn’t that what you can expect from, say, a CRM system?

[What’s different is] that it should be a combination of your internal data sources and external data sources. There is the conception superficially that you’d think you should do that with a CRM system. But here’s the point — you shouldn’t have to do it inside the CRM system. You should be able to do it anywhere. It is to take this issue of data access outside the confines of any application… Because if the CRM vendor doesn’t integrate all the data you need integrated, the integration can’t take place. The Idea [of the semantic web] is to empower everyone to mesh data as required by specific needs.

Just as you have the real-time enterprise, you are going to have the real-time individual. The common characteristic is this ability to discover and integrate relevant data in relevant domains.

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