Re: Commercial/Real-world Semantic Web Services?

On Oct 9, 2006, at 6:13 PM, Ed Addison wrote:

> I would suggest that those commercial applications that use  
> semantic web, or semantic web-like technology would not necessarily  
> advertise that that's what they are doing.  The semantic web is a  
> tool, not a product or market. SInce the semantic web is in its  
> infancy, commercial applications that do use semantic web  
> technology most likely use a significantly scoped down subset of  
> it.  The semantic web is more likely to slowly infiltrate various  
> information products and web services rather than suddenly get  
> commercial adoption.  Might be tough to find or even classify the  
> cases for your study.  Good luck.

One must be especially careful about such suggestions. While it is  
true that companies using SWS tech may not have a reason to advertize  
that (esp. if it is not their product!), it runs a bit close to the  
"there *is* stuff going on *because* we don't know about it". There  
are enough people interested that I would expect *some* information  
to leak out. In any case, it's best to be humble :)

Also, the original criteria weren't clear. For example, are XACML and  
WS-Policy "semantic web like" technology?

But to answer the original poster, I personally don't know of any  
(successfully) commercial or production uses of OWL-S, WSMO, or the  
like, at least off hand. I wouldn't take that as conclusive, but I do  
take it as not a healthy sign.

I did work with Fujistu on Task Computing (taskcomputing.org). I  
don't know if that would help.

At the SWS workshop of the w3c I did an informal poll of the  
participants asking if their organization was going to spend, oh, 1  
million dollars in the next year on SWS...I don't think anyone bit  
(you could look up the minutes). Some people suggested that they  
would be involved in a SWS startup in the next 5 years, but I had  
reason to take that with a grain of salt. Some one at that meeting  
suggested that people might keep their use secret and thus there was  
a lot more use than we knew about (which is what makes me hyper  
trigger about Ed's suggestion).

Another (perhaps mitigating?) point is that I had a conversation with  
a microsoft standards weenie wherein I was championing SWSs and his  
line was that MS was trying to get the lower levels of the stack  
firmed up (look how long WSDL took!). There was a lot of frustration  
with the poorness of interopt e.g., with WSDL 1.1 (see the existence  
of WS-I).

So, perhaps the time hasn't been ripe. The WS-Policy group wasn't  
interested, at the time, in the formal semantics I offered or the  
kinds of expressivity I wanted to add, hence I left the group.  
However, they had a very narrow goal, to rush a lightly enhanced  
version of WS-Policy "1.5" into rec. This is both good and bad, yea?  
It meant that the group cares about more expressive metadata for  
services and wants it solidly deployable. OTOH, it means innovation  
is hard to insert. Makes me regret I didn't work with the ad hoc WS- 
Policy group before the submission to the W3C.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Thursday, 12 October 2006 09:14:10 UTC