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<title>Semantic Web Advanced Development for Europe
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe">
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name="introMenu">Introduction</a>
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Semantic Blogging</a>
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Semantic Portals</a>
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Business Integration</a>
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Business Integration</a>
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<div id="rightcontent">
<h1 class="title">Themes: Business Integration</h1>
<h2 class="title">What do we mean by business integration?</h2>
<p class="title">Many businesses depend on a very complex and
heterogeneous mix of information. Solving a customer problem,
managing a workflow, establishing a supply chain or designing a new
product requires integrating many different sources of information
from many different enterprise systems.</p>
<p class="title">This is a huge and diverse problem area which has
spawned many important industry product streams. For example
integrating the information on supply chain and demand information
is at the heart of products such as <i>Enterprise Resource
Planners</i> like SAP; integrating metadata to manage document and
records content is the core of <i>Enterprise Document
Management</i><i>.</i> Within these huge areas the specific sub
problems of data integration (providing gateways onto different
data stores and data models) and application integration
(infrastructure for propagating changes in the data between
applications to invoke the business logic or services of one
application from another) are distinct subthemes and are themselves
multi-billion dollar industries.</p>
<p class="title">The typical approach taken by existing products is
often a centralizing one. A single application suite is used to
provide the desired integrated service and includes common
information models. The connecting applications are either replaced
by ones which conform to the centralized standard or they are
placed behind wrappers or gateways which allows them to
interoperate with the central solution.</p>
<p class="title">The semantic web offers relevant standards and
approaches that can help with these problems. It offers open
standards that can enable vendor neutral solutions, it offers a
useful flexibility (structured and semi-structured, formal and
informal, open extensibility) and it helps to support decentralized
solutions where that is appropriate.</p>
<p class="title">It is not a panacea. Many of the underlying
problems are fundamentally hard in terms of scale, incompatibility
of information models or lack of known semantics for existing data
and the semantic web is not a magic wand that side steps such
issues.</p>
<p class="title">Rather than expect semantic web tools to displace
existing data and application integration products we would expect
to see vendors of such products start to support semantic web
interoperability and begin to reuse some of the approaches.
Brandsoft's entry in the Enterprise Document Management space is,
perhaps, an early example of this.</p>
<p class="title">We would also expect new products to arise
catering to specific business integration problems which are
particularly good matches to the semantic web's strengths and
weaknesses. For example, some industries such as aerospace and
pharmaceuticals depend on a very expensive and knowledge intensive
design process that requires much deeper and more specialist
information integration than offered by generic enterprise document
management suites. It is not surprising to find that bioscience is
one of the most active areas of semantic web application.</p>
<h2 class="title">How does the semantic web help?</h2>
<p class="title">The semantic web data representation, RDF, offers
a common open standard format capable of representing both
structured data (such as that found in relational databases) and
semi-structured data (annotations, links and sparse properties that
are not uniformly applied across all instances of the same type).
Thus RDF can be used as a common interchange format.</p>
<p class="title">Whilst other formats can be used as well, RDF does
have some advantages. It is a generic open standard whereas many
alternatives are either proprietary or specific to an industry
segment. It standardizes the data model (together with a
serialization syntax) whereas alternatives such as direct use of
XML focus on the document syntax. By breaking down information into
small independent units (triples) and using global identifiers for
all objects/properties/types (URIs) it becomes possible to
integrate information from several sources by simply concatenating
the sets of the triples and following the new relations. The data
model is sufficiently simple and makes sufficiently few assumptions
that it be used to express both structured and semi-structured data
making integration across heterogeneous sources more
straightforward. By using specifically URIs, rather than any
arbitrary naming scheme, to identify objects then RDF works well
with other worldwide web standards including XML - this makes it
possible to use it as a glue to connect specialist data objects
expressed in formats such as MathML, SVG and so forth.</p>
<p class="title">A shared data model is not useful for information
integration unless the sources being integrated share, or can be
made to share, common vocabulary elements representing some shared
conceptual model. The second layer of the semantic web stack (RDFS,
OWL) enables the publication of such vocabularies. Again the use of
URIs to identify the concepts in this vocabularies makes it
possible to combine vocabularies from multiple sources - in
particular it is trivial to mix and match properties from multiple
vocabularies and to create new concepts that specialize or
generalize existing published concepts. This enables applications
to make a tradeoff between the degree of centralization required.
Rather than mandating use of a single central vocabulary it
encourages publication and reuse of vocabulary elements whilst make
it possible to extend or augment external vocabularies when needed.
The representations also offer some support for mapping between
vocabulary elements - though the discovery of such mappings remains
as challenging a problem as ever.</p>
<p class="title">An important strength of the semantic web stack is
the freedom it gives to chose the right degree of formal modeling
to apply to a given situation. A formal conceptual model may be
expressed using the full power of OWL/DL whereas a simple
hierarchical organization scheme can be expressed either in RDFS or
directly in RDF using a thesaurus vocabulary such as SKOS.</p>
<p class="title">Taken together these features mean that the
semantic web technology stack enables applications and information
sources to publish their data, vocabulary and conceptual models in
an open standards way that aids integration. This does not replace
the need for centralization and common data models in many business
activities. However, it does mean that where information is
naturally distributed and inhomogeneous (because it is used for
other specialized purposes) then it may still be possible achieve a
useful level of integration using these open standards in a way
that scales linearly with the number of sources rather than require
N*N specialist cross-translators.</p>
<h2 class="title">SWAD-Europe resources relevant to this
problem</h2>
<h3 class="title">Information integration demonstrators</h3>
<p class="title">The <a href="sem-blog.html">semantic blogging</a>
and <a href="sem-portal.html">semantic portals</a> together
illustrate some of the features of an information integration
infrastructure. The semantic portal illustrates a process of
aggregating RDF data from multiple sources and integrating it to
provide a common browsable view. The semantic blogging demonstrator
illustrates how small informal information items can be published
by individuals in a lightweight way. The two demonstrators can be
(and have been) combined for applications such as knowledge
management where individuals can publish news items and small
information snippets that integrate with structured data sources
accessed via a common portal.</p>
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