Business Case for Semantic Web Technologies

W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach

Interest Group Presentation

Copyright © 2008 W3C®

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> Why Care About the Semantic Web

It will empower, directly and indirectly, new business
capabilities
It will help to throttle back IT expenditures within
medium and large businesses
…by transforming the very foundation of business
software, and in particular, the way data is shared and
analyzed

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> What is Semantic Web

AKA: “Web 3.0” and “Data Web”
The Semantic Web is a fundamentally unique way of
specifying data and data relationships
It is more declarative, more expressive, and more
consistently repeatable than Java/C++, Relational DBs,
and XML documents
It builds upon and preserves the conventional data
model’s respective strengths.

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> Your Call to Action

Invest in training and skills development now
Prototype a solution for a small project and explore the
new tools now
Probe you software vendors and key partners about
their semantic technology roadmap now
Compel your enterprise architects to formulate a multi-
year metadata strategy now

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> Why Act Now

Semantic Web is a Low Risk Option
Semantic Web can be a Tactical Fit (Incremental)
Semantic Web is supported by your Partners

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> It Can Be Low Risk

Status quo is risky
Data and Sensor (Instrument) Proliferation
Complexity Explosion
Executive Mandates & Pressures
Discounted Cash Flow trap
Conventional risk assessments falsely favor do-nothing
strategy (by assuming status quo inputs into future)
Semantic Web offers safety and protection
By correctly investing in technology that can
accommodate extreme levels of data proliferation and
complexity

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> Discounted Cash Flow Trap

“Most executives compare the cash flows from innovation against the default
scenario of doing nothing, assuming—incorrectly—that the present health of the
company will persist indefinitely if the investment is not made. For a better
assessment of the innovation’s value, the comparison should be between its
projected discounted cash flow and the more likely scenario of a decline in
performance in the absence of innovation investment.”

Christensen, C. M., Kaufman, S. P., &

Shih, W. C. (2008, 01). Innovation Killers.
Harvard Business Review .

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> It Can Be A Tactical Fit

Information-centric requirements
capabilities for analytics and data management
measures of data flexibility, audit-ability, and savings
Tactical IT projects benefit from semantics
(incrementally, without a big-bang adoption path)
Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) data services
Portal applications and data mashups
Data Integration, Replication, and Migration
“a little semantics goes a long way…”

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> Your Partners Support It

Ask your partners about their plans to adopt Semantic
Web standards for metadata and data.
Large vendors supporting semantic technology
Hewlet Packard
IBM
Microsoft
Oracle
SAP

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> Technical Superiority

Semantic Web standards are the first data standards
that were purpose-built for supplying flexible metadata
(no other languages have that historic purpose)
Areas where RDBMS, UML, and XML technologies are
misused, and where Semantic Web technologies excel,
include the following:
Specification of computationally sound business
information models
Specification of linking and relationship (meta)data
across physical data locations
Specification of dynamic structural logic and rules that
are part of the data realm
Specification of a federation approach for geographically
separate data records
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> Widespread Acceptance

Object Management Group – controls UML and CWM
specifications, is adopting RDF and OWL as the centerpiece
specification for their core Definitional Metamodels
International Standards Organization – controls various
EDI and Metadata specifications, is adopting RDF and OWL
within several ISO specification families
World Wide Web Consortium – controls XML and SOA
specifications, is adopting RDF and OWL as extensions to
existing XML and Web Service specifications
OASIS – controls many vertically-oriented business data
specifications, is adopting RDF and OWL as a core feature
in standards for Documents, Data Centers, Security, and
Business Process Management

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> Tactical and Strategic

The Semantic Web can be tactically applied to the
following projects:
Data Integration, at the XML, RDBMS, and Object software
tiers
Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) data services
IT maintenance and IT infrastructure management
Portal applications and data mashups
Data Replication, Migration and Transformation
It can also be strategically applied to the following
business initiatives:
Enterprise Information Management
Decision Support Systems
Enterprise Governance and risk (including policy compliance)

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> For Business Data Integration

Maximize the value of information
Information sharing with ultimate flexibility
Greater level of future-proofing and re-use
Data isn't trapped within individual applications

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> Web of Data

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> The Semantic Web Will

Empower, directly/indirectly, new business capabilities
because they enable stronger and more consistent
metadata linking, automatic inference for dynamic data
structures, and a more declarative foundation model for
shared business information
Throttle back IT expenditures within medium and large
businesses with reduced head-count requirements for the
management of enterprise information assets, decrease
the long-term costs of integration, and simplify
decentralized data architectures
Transform the foundation of enterprise software as all
major software vendors adopt Semantic Web
specifications within the context of their own mainstream
tools
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> Your Call to Action (again)

Invest in training and skills development now
Prototype a solution for a small project and explore the
new tools now
Probe you software vendors and key partners about
their semantic technology roadmap now
Compel your enterprise architects to formulate a multi-
year metadata strategy now

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> A Few Citations

Ovum Analysts:
– store.ovum.com/Product.asp?pidhttp://=36856
NIST, Interoperability Cost Analysis of the US Automotive Supply Chain. 1999
– http://www.nist.gov/director/prog-ofc/report99-1.pdf
Christensen et al; Innovation Killers, Harvard Business Review, 2008
– http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?
articleID=R0801F&referer=/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp&reason=unknown&productId=R0801F&ml_s
ubscriber=false&ml_action=get-sidebar&ml_context=sidebar&ml_id=R0801F&ml_sidebar_id=1
Jim Hendler & Ora Lassila: "Semantic Web @ 5 (years)" Semantic Technologies 2006:
– http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler/presentations/SemTech2006-keynote.pdf
Jeff Pollock & Susie Stephens: "Enterprise Semantic Web," Semantic Technologies 2007:
– http://me.jtpollock.us/pubs/2007.05-Pollock.STC.2007.pdf
Semantic Web Tools:
– http://esw.w3.org/topic/SemanticWebTools
Semantic Web Use Cases:
– http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/
Deborah McGuinness: "Question Answering on the Semantic Web," IEEE Intelligent Systems, Volume
19, No. 1, January/February, 2004
• Ora Lassila: "The Resource Description Framework," IEEE Intelligent Systems, Volume 15(6): 67-69
November/December 2000

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> A Few Citations (cont.)

Berners-Lee, Testimony to the United States Congress, Hearing on the "Digital Future of the United
States: Part I -- The Future of the World Wide Web"
– http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2007/03/01-ushouse-future-of-the-web.html
Horrocks at al; "From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: The Making of a Web Ontology Language." Journal of
Web Semantics, 1(1):7-26, 2003.
– http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/ian.horrocks/Publications/download/2003/HoPH03a.pdf
OIL EC/IKT Commission
– http://www.ontoknowledge.org/oil/misc.shtml#part
DAML DARPA Commission
– http://www.daml.org/about.html
Object Management Group, "Ontology Definition Metamodel, OMG Adopted Specification"
– http://www.omg.org/docs/ptc/07-09-09.pdf
International Standards Organization, ISO/IEC 24752-5 "User Interface Resource Specification"
– http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=42313
International Standards Organization, "Industrial automation systems and integration—Integration of life-
cycle data for process plants including oil and gas production facilities"
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15926
W3C GRDDL/SAWSDL citation
– http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/grddl-wg/ & http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/sawsdl/
OASIS DCML/SAML citation
– http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=security
OASIS Open Document Format:
– http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office

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