Semantic Web technologies were designed from the ground up for disparate information integration. Disparate data and its impact on data quality and consistency remain one of the most difficult challenges facing large enterprises today. Yet, there has been relatively little use of Semantic Web technologies in these organizations.

As I was preparing for my upcoming embedded RDF/microformats talk at the Semantic Technology Conference, I wasn’t too surprised at the level of discourse that has transpired between the RDF evangelists and the microformat followers.  I’ve been around long enough to remember the object-oriented vs. relational database arguments, various interpreted vs. compiled language brouhahas and CORBA vs. the world.  Many of the same competing themes reappeared: performance, ease-of-use, flexibility and learning curves to name a few.

Taking a break from ontology visualization, we investigate an novel technology out of TopQuadrant that gets users one step closer to realizing the power of the Semantic Web.

This second edition of the SemanticReport includes topics and contributions from a variety of sources.  We have been encouraged by your response to our inaugural issue last month, and have made every effort to continue to deliver information to you that is pertinent to bringing semantic technology into the business world.

Did you ever notice how many Semantic Web applications are so focused on providing graph views? Sure, graphing makes sense from the third sentence in any RDF tutorial you read. The basic building blocks of information: objects, predicates and subjects come together to form triples DNA. From this, all knowledge springs to life, interconnecting and weaving until everyone and everything are separated by nothing more than a chockfull of vertices and nodes. Graphs make it so easy to grasp the connections, so simple to walk the data, so intuitive to see how it all fits together.

Most of us are familiar with the Protege-OWL editor as a widely-used visualization tool for ontologies.  Recently, a new tool called OwlSight was released from the consulting firm of Clark & Parsia , a small cadre of engineers and researchers with ties to the Universities of Maryland and Manchester.