Re: Enterprise semantics

Can I rephrase this question to see if I understand it correctly?
I think you must be aware of the areas in which semantic technologies have
been adopted, this includes publishing e.g. internal publishing of articles
that pertain to the law and legislation, bio-medical research and, possibly,
other areas of research where there is a need to express complex properties
of a subject and surface them for investigators.

How the semantic techniques in the above are accomplished may vary since
many implementations have RDBMS as their back end, both as triple stores and
other forms.
Assuming only a triple store is used the question becomes what in general
are the advantages of a simple fixed schema back end triple store plus
semantic mappings over an RDBMS with ORM mappings.
We would have to put aside the means by which each is developed and also
variations such as where an ORM may be extended to accommodate Semantic
mappings (perhaps through injection from a side by side triple store or
otherwise.)
Since semantic technologies are used in a business context, as pointed out,
I will try to rephrase:-
"Do you agree that a simple and direct business case needs to be made for
the use of semantic technologies in conjunction with triple stores in
businesses where the benefit compared to RDBMS and ORM is not immediately
apparent to them?"

Where one is in a position to make such a business case, or is modelling it
more generically openly on the internet, the answer is yes, I do think so. I
would start from the parallel with businesses that do use it. My
understanding is that in those cases the domain that is being modelled is
sufficiently known, stable, long lived and valuable to the business to make
the risk of investing the resources worth while.

I think that what people are working their way around to realising is that
there is another sort of domain that falls into this category that is not
the obvious one of internal or intra company research into molecular
structures etc. It is the domain of our selves, perhaps thought to be
inaccessible because of the dominance of a few players at the moment, but
assuredly not so. A moments reflection into the nature of data, how it can
be generated and the oblique areas it may pertain to should confirm this.

Does this answer your (rephrased) question?

Best,

Adam



On 1 June 2011 23:12, Sebastian Samaruga <cognescent@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I was wondering if there is a real business application, framework or
> whatever who takes 'semantic' techniques
> or semantic back ends and triple stores for doing something useful in such
> a way where an explicit or implicit
> advantage over using actual RDBMSs or ORM tools can be acknowledged.
>
> Can 'semantics' be leveraged with such a layer in a way where the
> 'knowledge' expressed in those triples is in
> some way useful to an application developer who needs to expose some
> functionality to end users in the form
> of use-cases and there 'semantics' make a real difference?
>
> Aren't we needing some kind of 'on-rails' approach where we 'know' not only
> for the pure pleasure of 'knowing'
> but in the aim of doing something useful in the pursue of a users needs
> requirements purpose. What we lack
> here are application 'standards', patterns or guidelines in which one could
> base an application development
> specification proposal that can be presented to some manager in the hope to
> be successfully accepted as
> a solution addressing some needs, and not to be scared because it will
> surely be rejected because it is not
> an enterprise or business level specification because of being based on
> inmature or non-standard ways.
>
> Are there some efforts in achieving such goals that I'm missing?
>
> Meanwhile, trying to oversimplify, there are some Semantic-ORM like
> techniques we are trying to develop,
> including a higher level object graph navigation language with semiotic
> additions:
> http://cognescent.googlecode.com
>
> Best,
> Sebastián Samaruga - Cognescent
> http://cognescent.blogspot.com
>
>
>