Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Businesses are beginning to consider leveraging semantic web tools and RDF stores to get answers from their many worlds of data -- but the existing databases and the data structures upon which those tools will be layered aren't going away, and neither will the challenges of dealing with their data. Still, semantic tools can be leveraged to eliminate the need to build yet another data warehouse -- which can ease the IT department's maintenance workload -- by improving the business user's ability to get the information he needs, regardless of where the data lives.

Semantic tools are treading where document management systems and portals have tried to tread before, with the result that essentially a collection of mini-silos simply wind up somewhere where users can have centralized access to more mini-silos, says Cambridge Semantics' CEO Mike Cataldo, speaking at the Web 3.0 Conference here. These neatly organized and separate silos of data can be enormously inefficient.

"And once those silos get maxed out, you just do it all over again," he said. The data is not where it needs to be -- in one big, interconnectable and queryable pile. "Semantics takes an entirely different approach -- leave the data where it is and create a semantic fabric that layers over it and virtualizes the data. Then let the user create a view of what they want and then fill that picture in with data from whatever the appropriate host system is."

Tremendous efficiencies can be gained by linking data semantically, Cataldo said. Applying semantic technology such as Cambridge's Anzo system to the problem, he noted, does away with the difficulties imposed by traditional data structures, which require the user with questions to have prior knowledge of where data is -- oh, and there had better not be a need to change that data structure, either.

"With semantics you put that aside. You don't have to contemplate in advance what data is going to show up. The data structure defines itself as data arrives. And you don't have to know where it is. If you just know what you are looking for, in the semantic world you can have access to that data."

And semantic tools that can make the connections between disparate data sets also can give users the lens they desire to deploy, so that they can look at the data the way they would like to. From data access that makes data "infinitely consumable" to doing something with the data, Cataldo said, "is how you actually enable practical business solutions" with semantic web technologies.

He described to the audience what this could mean to a company such as Chevron, which has some 213 million spreadsheets spread across the enterprise. His expectation is that semantic technologies will evolve as an enabling business model rather than as applications per se.

"I see people building applications on semantic platforms and structures that aren't practical today," thanks to the limitations of traditional data structures, he says.