PriceWaterhouseCoopers Spring Technology Forecast (Part 1)

In an earlier post, I mentioned PriceWaterhouseCoopers' spring technology forecast and its discussion of the Semantic Web in business. In this and the following post, I want to overview and highlight several of the articles. Let's start with the first featured article ...

Spinning a data Web overviewed the technologies of the Semantic Web, and discussed how businesses can benefit from developing domain ontologies and then mediating/integrating/querying them across both internal and external data. The value of mediation is summarized in the following figure ...

I like this, since I said something similar in my post on the Semantic Web and Business.

Backing up this thesis, Tom Scott of BBC Earth provided a supporting quote in his interview, Traversing the Giant Global Graph. "... when you start getting either very large volumes or very heterogeneous data sets, then for all intents and purposes, it is impossible for any one person to try to structure that information. It just becomes too big a problem. For one, you don’t have the domain knowledge to do that job. It’s intellectually too difficult. But you can say to each domain expert, model your domain of knowledge— the ontology—and publish the model in the way that both users and machine can interface with it. Once you do that, then you need a way to manage the shared vocabulary by which you describe things, so that when I say “chair,” you know what I mean. When you do that, then you have a way in which enterprises can join this information, without any one person being responsible for the entire model. After this is in place, anyone else can come across that information and follow the graph to extract the data they’re interested in. And that seems to me to be a sane, sensible, central way of handling it."