Implementing Innovative IT Solutions with Semantic Web Technologies

Abstract

With modern transportation, communication, and business connections, distances are becoming narrower and competition tougher. Therefore, successful companies nowadays need to adapt to changes in environment more rapidly than they used to. Besides ever rapidly changing environment, an organizational shift towards customer has been noticed. For the last ten years or so there has been a steady international move towards changing the way customer services are delivered, financed and regulated, with the main purpose being the improvement of efficiency so that more customers could receive better service more quickly without reducing (and possibly increasing) the quality. On the other hand, the world is witnessing a remarkable proliferation of new knowledge. With the development of information technology the amount of various business data being created and stored is growing exponentially. The endeavour of researchers and engineers to take advantage of this new knowledge, coupled with an increasing need to use limited resources more efficiently, has presented unique challenges. As new knowledge and solutions to systemic problems is sought for, it is appropriate to ask how the revolution in information and communications technologies may facilitate efficiency and prevent unnecessary duplication of effort. Many times it has been proven that the proper use of proper knowledge is the best way of optimizing work processes. In order to improve the usability and performance the effort duplication should be minimized, access to information resources improved and possibly unified, and the information technology utilized in such a manner that would allow users to make advantage of information they need without having to bother with the abundance of them. As the evolution of information technology and software design progresses the possible solutions to the above idea could be knowledge management and web-based software services, combined within a unified technology. Based on our experiences in developing software solutions, it is our belief that semantic web technologies could be the one technology to solve this task. In the following sections we will try to present the properties of this technology together with some advices on how to utilize it properly.