The Semantic Web: Finally Becoming Enterprise-Ready
By Alice LaPlante
The Semantic Web was first envisioned in the late 1990s as the ultimate tool to harness the Internet's ever-accelerating growth of data. Then and today, information searches are limited by the keywords people manually enter; if you don't know the right keyword, you may miss ferreting out the information you need. Rather than restricting searches to information stored in a traditional folder hierarchy, Semantic Web technology allows companies to navigate through all the resources in an organization -- not just digital, but also social and human resources as well -- by making logical inferences that previously only humans could make.
"The Semantic Web promises to organize the world's information in a much more logical way," says Marc Fawsi, an analyst at Evolving Trends in San Francisco. "And once machines can understand and use information, the world will never be the same."
Semantics in Action
Today, Semantic Web technology is seeping into corporations and government agencies to build sophisticated knowledge bases and knowledge management systems, says Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, in San Francisco. "Government agencies as well as firms like Eli Lilly and Oracle are using it to improve discovery of what exists in unstructured documents and data collections scattered through their organizations."
For example, say a pharmaceutical company wanted to find all information related to a certain disease, including all the drugs and treatments and conditions related to that disease. Previously, a search would bring up only those documents or database records that contained the keywords specified by the (article continues)
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