Re: Intranet ontology?

Hiya,

"Rob Styles" <rs@kasabi.com> wrote:
> A thought just occurred to me that might explain why there aren't any
"intranet" ontologies.

I can go along with this to some degree, but I've also been in the
enterprise sem web buiness for over 10 years, and there's been so much talk
about this, so much hoopla that apparently never amounted to much in this
field. And, hey, I'm guilty of working towards that semantic vegemite in
the enterprise myself without - perhaps a bit introspective - sharing much,
or jumping on a wagon that could share.

I'd like to put forward another reason why there's not much Intranet
ontologies; enterprises are notoriously guarded behind firewalls and
security and silo-mentalities where an open attitude towards resolving and
sharing is perhaps lacking? And that dreaded vendor lock-in of key
infra-structural middleware (SOA, ESB, etc.) on top that perhaps a) doesn't
work with open sem web standards, and b) without support from said vendors.

I've seen exceptions, of course, but they are sparse and few apart. I
remember a time (hmm, more than 8 years ago?) hearing about the WS-* stack
moving towards ontology interoperable languages, but again, once stuck in
the RPC world and tying everything you've got to it, the lack of a semantic
way to deal with these rather complex problems seems to be a more academic
thought experiment rather than backed by industry. I'm speculating, of
course.

> The intranet is just where the data happens to be right now.

Well, hmm, kinda. In my travels (and work) the data has always been in the
Intranet, in portals and landing pages, mini websites, databases and so
forth. I guess what we're talking about here is the name for this
collection, but I can't remember a time when it wasn't called Intranet
rather than more specific terms, but I certainly take your point.

However, after looking for ontologies for KM, RDBMS, network topology, CMS,
CAM, CR, ESB, SOA, I can't really say I'm the wiser. It seems that the
enterprise world is somewhat reluctant to take on either sem web tech, or
sharing of the ontologies used within (and behind) the firewall. And what I
do find in the open has a huge overlap that I find hard to easily merge.
Hmm. But I'll keep looking.

thanks for the insight!

Alex