When people think about orchestration efforts, they tend to think about centralized, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)-based efforts. The service elements are published into reusable components that can be stitched together into workflows. This vision of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) allows central metrics of use and stability, but it precludes a common use case familiar to Unix users.

RelFinder, a new Adobe Flex-based application, has been announced by a collection of researchers from the University of Stuttgart, the Carlos III University of Madrid and the University of Duisburg-Essen. Additional contributions have been made by individuals from the University of Leipzig and AKSW.

The application can be configured to point to arbitrary RDF datasets exposed through a SPARQL endpoint, but uses several standard data sets out of the box. The default sources include:

Cirrus Shakeri, SAP Labs In this talk we will report on using semantic technologies in implementing tools for enterprise information management and decision support systems. We have built proof-of-concept software tools that assist knowledge workers in making sense of information within the context of some business processes.

It’s tough times out there for little companies swimming in big markets, and unlike some pundits, I don’t pretend that the Semantic Web has already “made it” as a quantifiable software market. In the Semantic Web for Dummies book, I’ve tried to offer a lot of practical advice about which uses of the Semantic Web are making people’s lives easier today.