Ontoprise: Semantic Web Technologies at Business

Abstract

In former days Tim Berners-Lee proposed a soon breakthrough of the Semantic Web. As a breakthrough he considered every second web page to be connected to an ontology. In the mean time we have seen a lot of applications of semantic technologies, like semantic web services, semantic information integration, and ontology based search for documents. However it seems also clear that the forecast of TBL did not (yet) arrive. While in the last years there has always been great academic interest in Semantic Web and in semantic technologies and even first industrial products appeared, we did not see the industrial breakthrough of Semantic Web technologies. On the other hand there was a strong increasing interest in other trends like SOA architectures, Web 2.0 etc. which ruled out Semantic Web in publicity and in connected activities like new product developments, foundations of new companies, and money involved. The question arises what are the reasons for that and which of these newer trends could have an influence on the further development of semantic technologies. While so far the Semantic Web was driven to a large extent from the academic side, its future acceptance and relevance to the industrial world heavily depends on whether the future development of Semantic Web technologies is influenced by industry needs rather than pure academic ones. This becomes essential and will decide whether semantic technologies are considered as relevant technology and will be used in future industrial applications and products. In actual industry applications, it was proved that the combination of trendy topics like SOA and Web 2.0 with intelligent features of semantic technologies generates large impact for the industrial and business world and thereof - the breakthrough of the Corporate Semantic Web.