Bringing Semantic Technology to the Enterprise

s seen at the recent 2008 Semantic Technology conference in San Jose, serious interest in corporate use of semantic technology continues to grow rapidly. Semantically-enabled applications are increasingly seen as fertile ground for Web 2.0 applications such as mash ups as well as the basis for innovative business intelligence strategies, internal collaboration wikis, and rich canonical models for service-oriented architectures (SOA).

What’s lacking, however, is a clear understanding of where semantic technology fits in enterprise architectures. Should it be thought of primarily as purely a web technology to integrate information on the presentation layer? Should it be seen as closer to the data layer of the application because of its potential to bring disparate sets of data together? Alternatively, should semantic technology be focused on the increasingly important middle layer of enterprise architectures where messaging and service implementations live?