Oracle Sees Semantic Tech Solving Business Problems

Oracle is pushing hard on the application of semantic technologies to enterprise business problems. bITa Planet recently caught up with Robert Shimp, vice president of Oracle’s global technology business unit, to discuss what problems Oracle believes semantic technologies can solve for customers -- and how.

bITa Planet: How does Oracle support semantic technologies?

Shimp: Today we not only support the core data standards for the semantic web inside our database, but our application integration architecture, or AIA, offering uses semantic technology. We are already shipping that capability today as an integration capability for our applications. You’ll see more and more semantic technologies weaving its way into products as we go along.

We have a fundamental advantage in that with enterprise applications, you know an awful lot about the business process going on, the people that are using it, and so on, and that means the application can have a lot of metadata that it knows about what’s going on. The fact that we can store that metadata inside the database means we can provide far richer transactions and business processes for customers. It’s that ability to provide both the applications and the database that gives us that advantage.

How did Oracle get out in front on the semantic technology?

Oracle is the leading supplier of database technology for geographic information systems. We’ve been doing that for at least a decade or more. It turns out that maps or geographic information systems use a mathematical model called a network model. In other words, basically a map is all about different points and locations and the distance between points. It turns out that semantic technology uses exactly the same mathematical model to represent the links between concepts and ideas. So as we developed GIS technology over the years, it was relatively easy for the same development team to supply this same technology for semantic technology purposes.

Among the first companies Oracle worked with that were interested in applying semantic technologies to their business problems were those in the pharmaceuticals industry and government. How is the make-up of companies interested in this changing?

We’re now seeing lots of customers in different areas — financial services, pharmaceuticals companies, large manufacturers in the airplane or automotive industries — using semantic technologies for many different enterprise purposes. It boils down to having lots of data sources to reconcile information, like parts numbers to understand real time data flows, or obscure proteins in the drug discovery process. Semantic technology is very powerful for creating inferences about data and organizing the information in new and interesting ways.

The two main business problems that mainstream types of companies deal with are having lots of sources of customer names and addresses and trying to reconcile them out of their CRM and support systems and order processing systems -- who is the customer and ensuring I have one customer record. That’s a very typical example. There are multiple databases of sources that were never designed to work together but you must be able to pull data out of them and rationalize the information. Traditionally that’s been done using ETL technologies and data hubs and data warehousing technologies.

The other common business problem is parts — lots of parts and suppliers, with different numbers even if they’re very similar. Trying to keep track of what’s what and what you can order from someone is very complicated. Semantic technology lets you say this part from supplier one is equivalent to this part from the other supplier.

There are even bigger possibilities for semantic technology. Think about business intelligence ... What if BI tools could tap into existing data and provide you intelligence in real time. There are huge opportunities there to increase the value of your IT.