Industrial Semantics and Magic

It's time for academic research in semantics to be industrially relevant. Industry adapts slowly to new ideas, with large companies following start-ups' new technologies. Academics are confused about the problem they're solving, as well as the problems that industry solved. Some of this confusion concerns the difference between static semantics and process descriptions. Investigating real industry problems offers academics a vast and challenging array of research problems. The incentive problem, however, is that academics get rewarded for interesting theoretical, rather than practical, advances unless they start companies. So, we need new mechanisms for bringing the industrial and academic communities together and new incentives for both. The SWS (semantic Web services) challenge is only a start