Today, I had the opportunity to be on the panel at Enterprise Data World to discuss the role of semantic technologies in enterprise data management. The panel followed a working session consisting of roundtable discussions exploring a number of specific topics related to this theme. All-in-all, a very interesting and revealing set of discussions.
The two most revealing points that stuck were:
1. There is significant confusion between semantic technologies and semantic web. In some respect, this is a bit embarrassing for the community that is trying to define semantics of other things. The consensus was that we need to keep the two separate and define each clearly. The challenges and solutions are not the same between the two. I mostly agree with this.
2. Semantic technologies seem to threaten the status quo in the enterprise data community -- in much the same way as object-oriented programming did to the C-development community in the late 80's (so it seemed to me, anyway). I didn't see this coming. "we can model anything using our current techniques and technologies -- so why do we need semantic xxx". The reluctance to adopt this recently popularized technology (I won't call it new) was quite significant.
I thought it was important to note some of the thoughts that came out of this group (without any perspectives, endorsements or editorials):
Semantic technologies-
1. do the same job as data modeling but better/faster.
2. add web-centric web aspect to the table-centric world of relational databases. Are easily extensible (rather than expanding tables after tables)
3. Ontologies provide significant flexibility in modeling
4. means that a term is defined by its relationship to other concepts instead of text paragraphs
5. and definitions can capture logical discrepancies
6. provide for more precisely defined taxonomic terms
We will try to take these discussions and perspectives to Semantic Technology conference in June. It will be interesting to see how these perspectives evolve in the near-term.
-Sanjiva, Tampa, April 8, 2009
Comments