News: data-driven enterprise - slouching toward the semantic Web

Many organizations are still trying to figure out how to build a mostly object-oriented Web services system. In explaining the semantic Web's enterprise possibilities, the author emphasizes the benefits of direct access to the data within applications rather than integrating the applications themselves. Some industry observers still see the semantic Web as a theoretician's dream. Enterprises are still trying to figure out how to integrate applications via Web services and service-oriented architectures, so asking them to begin drawing up semantic Web capable taxonomies anytime soon isn't realistic. The knowledge sharing that would entice enterprises would allow relational databases to directly import ontologies and rules just as easily as they use standard SQL insert, update, and delete statements. Ontologies can act as the glue between multiple information sources, providing a consistent view of all the information, augmenting it and filling in the gaps. The best route for success will be to stop emphasizing what the semantic Web might do in the future and work instead on practical steps to improve the architecture.