thenagin The SOA Arsenal Metaphor

All:

Then:
http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2007/03/briefingsdirect-soa-insights-analysts.html

Again:

Dana raised that metaphor in his opening remarks on this particular podcast, which was recorded on Friday January 26 of this year. That word has made me giggle since Morrissey brit-punned on it in the title to one of his early solo albums. Do a quick Google to giggle along with the master of mope.

Won’t go any further down--or up--that dirty boulevard of metaphorical elaboration. As for the podcast, we discussed three very substantial topics: best-of-breed SOA suites, master data management (MDM), and the “new enterprise architect.” Other panelists included Messrs. Gardner, Garone, McKendrick, Baer, and Macehiter.

Re best-of-breed SOA suites, here’s what I said then (and said more or less the same yesterday, August 3 2007, to Jon Brodkin of Network World, so it’s interesting to see that my fundamental perspective hasn’t altered significantly over the past half-year…or maybe I’m stuck in my ways…you decide):

“Kobielus: …. Over time, we’ve all been seeing this notion of a SOA suite take root in the industry’s productization of their various features, functions, and applications. Now, the big guys -- SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, webMethods, for that matter lots of software vendors -- are saying, ‘Hey, we provide a bigger, 'badder' SOA suite than the next guy.’ That raises an alarm bell in my mind, or it’s an anomaly or oxymoron, because when you think of SOA, you think of loose coupling and virtualization of application functionality across a heterogeneous environment. Isn’t this notion of a SOA suite from a single vendor getting us back into the monolithic days of yore?

This thought came to me when I was reading a Wall Street Journal article earlier in the week about SAP, “SAP Trails Nimble Start-Ups As Software Market Matures.” There was one paragraph in there that just jumped out at me. They said, ‘Some argue that SAP's slump highlights a broader shift under way in business software, in which startup companies wield an advantage over established titans. Under this traditional business model companies buy large, costly packages of software from SAP and Oracle to help them run their back-office functions and so forth, but as the business software industry matures, many companies already have the big software pieces they need, and feel little urgency to replace them.’

So, clearly SAP is then sort of a driver in the SOA suite arena for few years with NetWeaver. Is the notion of SOA suite an oxymoron? Are there best-of-breed-suites? There are also best-of-breed SOA components, and I’m not sure that the notion of a suite, an integrated suite is really what companies are looking for from SOA. They want best-of-breed components with the assurance, of course, that those components are implementing the full range of SOA standards for heterogeneous interoperability. So, I’m taking issue with this notion of a ‘best-of-breed’ suite.”

Of course, I’m hyperguilty of using the term “best-of-breed” all the time in my coverage of the Data Management space. Here’s where I should declare how I construe it, and why I feel it adds value to my discussions of “who’s on first (second, third, fourth, ….nth) in BI, DW, DBMS, DI, DQ, MDM, CPM, CEP/ESP, EII, ETL, GRC, etc.,” so that I can make my peace with it in the sphere of “SOA suites.” Essentially, a “best-of-breed” (let’s call it “BOB” for short) vendor, solution, or product is not “the best” one on the market, but rather one that, for some well-defined market segment, satisfies some weighted/composite metric of a) functional breadth/depth, b) installed base/adoption, c) maturity/stability, d) integration/sophistication/evolution, and e) price/TCO. Fundamentally, BOB is a “shortlisting” criterion: it refers to one or more strategic vendor/supplier/providers in a particular segment that offer enterprise-grade, robust solutions and are worthy of deeper consideration, investigation, and evaluation by enterprise IT.

That said, I agree with the following observations by my fellow panelists that morning:

“Macehiter: ….We have to recognize that organizations increasingly are looking to rationalize their supply strategy. So, they’re increasingly looking to deal with a smaller number of vendors and suppliers, which is, in part, driving the move toward larger vendors attempting to offer a suite or portfolio of product capabilities that can help organizations manage the lifecycle of an SOA initiative….Companies are putting together a bunch of products under a common brand, whether it’s Oracle Fusion, SAP NetWeaver, or under the IBM WebSphere brand. [It’s important to consider whether the products under these brands actually] are well integrated and that they have a common management environment, common configuration environment, and common policy definition environment.”

”Garone: All of us on this podcast today know that the debate over best-of-breed versus integrated-stack approach has been going for many years in a variety of scenarios and contexts, and it hasn’t stopped. I don’t really like the word "suite." It reeks more of marketing than functionality. [What customers want is] an open environment where they can pick and choose and not be tied to one vendor, what overrides all this is a desire to get things done quickly, efficiently. They want a way in which they don’t have to be concerned about integrating a lot of products and what that entails, and having potentially an unreliable environment. What that points to is working toward one vendor. End users will do that even in the short term by choosing someone that they know they can grow with in the future.”

“McKendrick: … Now, Oracle is an interesting case. When I think of suites, I think Oracle demonstrates the best tendency in this area. In fact, they called their offering ‘The SOA Suite,’ and they include a number of components. I have spoken with some companies that have Oracle installations. Now, it should be noted that typically the customers for these suites are the installed base. The people who will be buying into the components of the Oracle SOA suite are companies that either have the Oracle applications, the E-Business suite or the Oracle database underneath. And, in most cases, they are buying into components of the suite.”

“Baer: ….. There is always going to be a tension between homogeneity and heterogeneity. For the customer, it’s going to be dictated obviously by what is already in place, basically as Joe [McKendrick] pointed out. If 60 percent of my functionality, or even say 30 or 40 percent of my functionality, is SAP, I’m likely to listen when SAP tells me about a NetWeaver Solution…..[The] fact is that at the infrastructural level, there is a desire to have consistency. I don’t want to have five security engines. I don’t want to have three different authentications, if possible. Obviously, we’re never going to get that one, centralized identity repository in the sky, but I want to at least have my management framework be as consistent as possible and to manage what will inevitably be, in most large organizations, a federation of different installed bases of different technologies.”

“Macehiter: …. We have to be careful to distinguish between the infrastructure that you require to enable SOA initiatives and what you’re trying to enable with that service-oriented initiative. Just because you want to have a loosely coupled component that you can combine in multiple ways to deliver business outcomes, doesn’t mean that the infrastructure that underpins that has to be similarly loosely coupled and based on the heterogeneous offerings from different vendors.”

And here was me, then, splitting the difference and attempting to sum up what seemed to be the consensus of the panel that morning (and, I assume, still):

“Kobielus: I agree -- I think that the notion of a best-of-breed SOA suite makes more sense from an enterprise customer’s point of view. Most enterprises want to standardize on a single vendor and a single stack for the SOA plumbing -- the registries and repositories and also the development tools. They want the flexibility to plug in the different application layer components from Oracle and SAP and others, that are SOA-enabled and that can work with that single-core-plumbing-stack from a single vendor.”

A minute or two later, Dana moved the discussion toward one of my core focus areas at Current Analysis: master data management (MDM). I don’t recall if I’ve laid out my MDM/SOA framework in this blog before (I assume that I have…so, in a Morrissey vein, stop me stop me stop me, stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before…or just fast-forward past the following bullets:

• SOA is a paradigm that focuses on maximizing reuse, sharing, and interoperability of valuable enterprise resources over distributed networking fabrics.
• Master, official, reference, scrubbed, corrected, standardized, normalized single-version-of-truth recordkeeping data is one of the most valuable/indispensable enterprise resources.
• MDM refers to the ecosystem of repositories, solutions, applications, components, tools, workflows, roles, rules, etc, that support lifecycle governance of master data sets, so that this “gospel” data can be maximally reused, shared, interchanged, etc in BI, CPM, BPM, ERP, CPM, and other applications throughout the enterprise, supply chain, etc.

That said, Dana framed the MDM-as-SOA discussion quite well that chilly late-Jan morning:

“Gardner: “We [he and Ash Kulkarni of Informatica] had a really long, interesting discussion about the role of data, master data, and metadata when it comes to moving toward SOA. We really shouldn’t lose track of the fact that as you move to applications as services, and you go loosely coupled, and you adopt more reuse across development with common frameworks, and use rich internet application interfaces -- what about the data? The data has to be managed as well. Increasingly, companies that have had mergers and acquisitions, or have just gotten myriad applications with varying views of something as specific as a customer identity -- there might be 10 or 15 different views of a customer, as defined by a variety of different applications. How do you manage that? And when you think about the progression of the data, it seems to me that if not in actuality, in a virtual sense, you want to become centralized with your data so that data can be used in a clean and impactful or productive way across all of your services.”

Then I uttered a short version of the MDM-as-SOA framework that I just now bulletized/expanded in this post a moment ago. Not going to excerpt that here, but I do want to re-present the following excerpt from I uttered then, in which I pointed out that MDM need not be implemented in a centralized fashion (departing from Dana had just stated or implied), but, rather, could leverage enterprise information integration (EII)—aka “data federation”—fabrics for unified governance of decentralized master data sets (this is an extremely important point in the MDM Maturity Model upon which I’m basing my growing body of vendor-specific MDM Solution Assessments for Current Analysis):

“Kobielus: ….[T]here are a lot of enterprise information integration (EII) vendors out there. EII revolves around really federated MDM, where you keep the data in its source repository, and then provide a virtualized access layer. This allows your business intelligence and other applications to access that data through a common object or model and a common set of access schemas -- wherever that data might reside -- but facilitated through a virtualized access layer. That’s very much EII as implemented by Business Objects, BEA, [IBM, Sybase, Composite Software, Red Hat/Jboss/MetaMatrix] and many other vendors, and is very much the approach for federated MDM.”

After we’d explored that theme for a few minutes more, then we moved into a discussion of the “new enterprise architect,” re the career path for SOA developers, integrators, analysts, etc. Here’s how Dana framed discussion on that topic, which was proposed by Joe McKendrick:

“Gardner: ….”There are a burgeoning number of critical skill sets that need to be applied to SOA. We’ve talked about data, whether it’s cleansing, transforming, virtualizing and approaching some sort of a MDM capability. We have talked about development and process, BPEL. We talked about infrastructure. There is the management, the architectural overview, and what’s our philosophy. It seems like we’re going to need a lot of very skilled people who are both generalists, as well as highly specific and technical. Because for SOA to work, a bunch of people who are highly specific -- but don’t share the same vision or have a general sense of the strategy -- probably won’t fare too well.”

Joe’s take on the topic:

“McKendrick: [Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink] is sounding the alarm bells that the folks that we need to drive SOA forward in the enterprise is this class of enterprise architects and enlightened architects, if you will. There are a lot of SOA projects everybody is interested in. Everybody’s kind of ginned up about SOA now, and we’ve been hearing about it. Enterprises really want to begin to either pilot or move SOA past the pilot stage, and 2007 should be a big year. Schmelzer feels there may not be enough architects who can take this high-level view and drive this process forward. Now, it’s interesting, but when I posted this on my blog, I got lot of feedback that perhaps architects are not the only ones who can really lead this effort. There are plenty of developers out there, high-level developers, who can also contribute to the process and interact with the business. The key behind this argument is that you need folks who know what’s going on technically, but can interact with the business. It can be a rare skill to have both.”

My two-cents on it, pointing out that such IT skills deficits are usually short-lived, as smart people quickly get the requisite training, or rise to the challenge, in order to seize these money- and career-making opportunities while they last:

“Kobielus: … Not to get reminiscent or anything, but 10 years ago, when we started seeing Java ramp up, we saw a lag there as well. A lot of organizations were really hungry for Java developers, and the universities came through with more focus on it, but later than probably most organizations wanted. What will happen here is that while this ramp-up goes on, we might see a lot of new business and new interest in service organizations that can provide the professional services required to get people through it.”

You can read the full transcript for the panel’s foreshortened discussion of this topic (we were near the end of the allotted 45 minutes and were trying to wrap it up gracefully). The highlight for me was Neil Macehiter’s take:

“Macehiter: “… the key skills that are required [revolve] around being able to interface with the business. One of the skills and attributes that you also need as a SOA architect is really this ability to balance supporting short-term business outcomes but keeping an eye on the longer-term objectives in terms of gaining high quality and maximizing IT value. That’s an equally difficult skill because too often architecture historically has been focused on quite discrete initiatives or infrastructure. I’m thinking about server architecture or network architecture rather than this broader perspective. There are skills occurring from such things as Oasis and what they are trying to do around things like SOA blueprints.”

All of which gives me a sweet seg-way into the core of my chat yesterday [once again, Fri Aug 3 2007—a week in which Dana didn’t convene the podcast panel] with Jon Brodkin of Network World, who was interviewing analysts, enterprise architects, practitioners, and so forth for a piece he’s writing on 5 tips for making SOA be “about the business,” or something to that effect. Over the half-hour or so that we spoke, I cobbled together the following 5 bulleted tips (I’m paraphrasing myself, since I generated them on the fly and didn’t write them down till now):

1) Banish the phrase “SOA” from your business vocabulary, and only speak in terms of the business metrics, benefits, ROI, etc from implementation of the principles associated with this approach.

2) Boil down SOA’s business metrics/benefits/ROI to the fewest number of actionable words (e.g., agility, modernization, consolidation, rationalization, simplification, optimization, rightsourcing) that can be used to justify/explain SOA-related projects to all business and IT stakeholders.

3) Establish an internal SOA planning/governance practice, under a broader business and IT governance umbrella, that can evaluate, approve, and authorize new SOA-related development/integration/infrastructure proposals for feasibility/ROI per clear corporate-standard metrics.

4) Implement a runtime SOA governance infrastructure/operations to ensure that the end-to-end fabric/ESB/app-infrastructure continuously complies with corporate business policies, SLAs, etc.

5) Provide all SOA governance participants/stakeholders—business analysts, enterprise architects, IT developers, operational personnel, etc.—with a common visual modeling/management framework to catalyze and maintain a consistent, consensus view of the shared environment on all levels, from high business level through drilldown to low-level “plumbing” details, per the needs of each stakeholder.

Or something to that effect. I’m curious to see if/how Jon quotes me in his article, or just paraphrases some segment of the thoughtstream.

Then again, it’s good to have this blog so that I can paraphrase myself, and thereby nail this stuff conceptually to my personal persistent arsenal. And you, all you enterprise architects out there, you’re more than welcome to stick these SOA business-oriented bulletpoints in your arsenals.

Jim

thenagin The SOA Platform, Grid, Bus, Backplane, Fabric, Framework, Mesh, Matrix, Environment, and Plumbing Metaphors

All:

Then:

http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2007/01/transcript-of-briefingsdirect-soa.html

Again:

Gasp! These can’t all be metaphors, can they? We all use them all the times to denote the phenomenon called SOA, and/or the various technologies, approaches, infrastructures, functions, services, tools, and components that enable SOA. I just quickly scanned the BriefingsDirect SOA Insights transcript for Friday, January 19, and extracted all of these keywords, which were tossed into the mix by Messrs. Gardner, Garone, Kobielus, McKendrick, and Ward-Dutton.

Let’s gloss over the fine distinctions among them right now….for all practical purposes, they’re synonyms in a master thesaurus that we SOA analysts--and SOA vendors/consultants/practitioners--keep in our heads and cross-substitute freely in our speech/writing in order to communicate elegantly—and not sound like brain-dead robo-geeks. They’re metaphors that, through repeated prosaic use, have acquired the illusory feel of literal descriptions. Semantically, they’re alternate keyword representations of the same concept.

Concepts are very fluid and fungible things. In my recent research, I’ve noticed that semantic search—driven by concepts, not mere keyword text strings--is the predominant commercial application of the emerging Semantic Web. Indeed, many Semantic Web vendors are primarily implementing the technology in search engines that leverage ontology-based concepts to improve search accuracy and reduce spurious hits.

However, keywords, not concepts, are what’s driving today’s commercial search industry. After all, keywords are the primary good that Google et al. are hawking. But that’s certainly going to change as semantics invade the search industry.

At lunch yesterday with the president of Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software, I was musing on the prospect of a future semantic-enabled Google selling concepts as a sort of super-premium keyword—clusters of semantically affiliated keywords—thesaurus entries hovering around taxonomy or ontology nodes. Imagine how expensive, and powerful, a Google concept will be. Imagine being able to buy the concept that represents your entire industry—e.g., “data quality software” or “location intelligence solutions”—so that any semantic search that’s anywhere in the keyword vicinity of those concepts will hit your company’s website first time every time.

How will semantic search vendors structure the user interface to enable concept-based search without obliterating the keyword-based search upon which they’ve based their entire revenue model so far? My sense is that it will be through the “search suggest” feature that both Google and Yahoo already provide (Yahoo just implemented it recently; Google’s had it for a while). In both cases, the search engine dynamically predicts the queries that users are most likely to want to see, based both on the characters that they’ve already typed into the query box, and based on the aggregate behavior of all search users. At the same time, the search engine is dynamically presenting the type-ahead completions of the likely search strings, thereby accelerating query that the user will ultimately select.

I suspect that semantic search engines will beef up this “search suggest” feature by adding algorithms that leverage formal top-down SOA Semantic Web ontologies, taxonomies, topic maps, thesauri, and other knowledge representations produced and maintained by subject matter experts (e.g., SOA industry analysts). Semantic search engines may also leverage the bottom-up ontology/taxonomies/maps/etc that emerge from wikis, social bookmarking sites, and other communities in Social Semantic Web, and/or that are extracted through text mining/analytics from the artifactual plankton (e.g., podcast transcripts) that permeates that branch of the ocean semantic.

But the podcast of January 19 wasn’t to discuss semantics, search, synonyms, metaphors, linguistics, or what have you. Rather, it was primarily about recent commercial product releases that advance SOA as a virtualization approach for cross-platform service development, execution, integration, and governance.

At the start, the call focused on TIBCO’s recent (at that time) release of its initial ActiveMatrix products, which provide a container, integration infrastructure, development tooling, and life-cycle governance framework for virtualized, cross-platform SOA and ESB (btw…”matrix” is from the Latin for “womb”). I had published a Current Analysis report on that announcement the month before, so it was still fresh in my mind at that time.

Neil Ward-Dutton began to articulate TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix SOA/ESB development and governance value prop:

“Ward-Dutton: Let’s look at it from the point of view of a development theme. What is required to help those guys get into building high-quality networks of services? There are loads of tools around to help you take existing Java code, or whatever, right-click on it, and create SOAP and WSDL bindings, and so on. But, there are other issues of quality, consistency of interface definitions, and use of schemas -- more leading-edge thinking around using policies, for example. This would involve using policies at design time, and then having those enforced in the runtime infrastructure to do things like manage security automatically and help to manage performance, availability, and so on….It seems to me that this is the angle they’re coming from, and I haven’t seen very much of that from a lot of the other players in the area.”

Steve Garone carried forward the theme of cross-platform SOA/ESB development abstraction in TIBCO ActiveMatrix:

“Garone: In my opinion, this raises that level of abstraction to eliminate a lot of the work developers have to do in terms of coding to a specific ESB or to a specific integration standard, and lets them focus on developing the code they need to make their applications work. But, I would pull back a little bit from the notion that this is purely, or at a very high percentage, a developer play. To me, this is a logical extension of what companies like TIBCO have done in the past in terms of integration and messaging. However, it does have advantages for developers who need to develop applications that use those capabilities by abstracting out some of the work that they need to do for that integration."

Joe McKendrick cited a couple of other (not-on-this-session) analysts to support TIBCO ActiveMatrix’ emphasis on the development side of SOA/ESB cross-platform virtualization, rather than on the integration (or “mediation”) side:

“McKendrick: [Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group) doesn’t see ESB as a solution that a company should ultimately depend on or focus on as mediation. She does seem to lean toward the notion of an ESB on the development side as a platform-versus-mediation system. I've also been watching the work of Todd Biske, he is over at MometnumSI [blogger note: Biske joined the Gardner Gang in later podcasts and is now a regular; Manes was invited but hasn’t yet responded]. Todd also questions whether ESBs can take on such multiple roles in the enterprise as an application platform versus a mediation platform. He questions whether you can divide it up that way and sell it to very two distinct markets and groups of professionals within the enterprise.”

Then Dana asked me for my thoughts. As you can see in the following extract, I don’t agree with Manes’ notion that ESB, as an architectural concept, should be limited just to a development platform. I’m very much of the notion that that ESB should be viewed as the [Platform, Grid, Bus, Backplane, Fabric, Framework, Mesh, Matrix, Environment, and Plumbing] upon which [Development, Integration/Mediation, and Governance of] SOA [as a practical paradigm for maximizing reuse, sharing, and interoperability of distributed resources] must be implemented (hey….how’s that for throwing a thesaurus/topic map at the problem?....but you get my drift….this is a complex sprawling oceanic topic…you can’t manage a huge body of water by damming it up in one place….it’ll gush forth elsewhere). Here’s specifically the exchange between SOA moderator Dana and SOA modeler Jim:

“Gardner: How about you, Jim Kobielus? Do you see the role of ESB getting too watered down? Or, do you see this notion of directing logic to the ESB as a way of managing complexity amid many other parts and services, regardless of their origins, as the proper new direction and definition of ESB?

“Kobielus: First of all, this term came into use a few years back, popularized by Gartner and, of course, by Progress Software as a grand unification acronym for a lot of legacy and new and emerging integration approaches. I step back and look at ESB as simply referring to a level backplane that virtualizes the various platform dependencies. It provides an extremely flexible integration fabric that can support any number of integration messaging patterns, and so forth.

“That said, looking at what TIBCO has actually done with ActiveMatrix Service Grid, it's very much to the virtualization side of what an ESB is all about, in the sense that you can take any integration logic that you want, develop it to any language, for any container, and then run it in this virtualized service grid.

“One of the great things about the ActiveMatrix service grid is that TIBCO is saying you don’t necessarily have to write it in a particular language like Java or C++, but rather you can compose it to the JBI and Service Component Architecture (SCA) specifications. Then, through the magic of ActiveMatrix service grid, it can get compiled down to the various implementation languages. It can then get automatically deployed out to be executed in a very flexible end-to-end ESB fabric provided by TIBCO. That’s an exciting vision. I haven’t seen it demonstrated, but from what they’ve explained, it’s something that sounds like it’s exactly what enterprises are looking for.

“It’s a virtualized development environment. It’s a virtualized integration environment. And, really, it’s a virtualized policy management environment for end-to-end ESB lifecycle governance. So, yeah, it is very much an approach for overcoming and taming the server complexity of an SOA in this level backplane. It sounds like it’s the way to go. Essentially, it sounds very similar to what Sonic Software has been doing for some time. But TIBCO is notable, because they’re playing according to open standards that they have helped to catalyze -- especially the SCA specifications.”

Then we discussed other vendor approaches in the same general ballpark: webMethods with Fabric, BEA with Liquid, and so forth, and brought model-driven development, UML, BPMN, and so forth into the chat. It got back to the issue from the previous week of SOA’s complexity, and how it can be reduced or controlled or managed. Here were my fresh thoughts on the topic, responding to a remark that Neil Ward-Dutton had just made:

“Kobielus: Neil nailed it on the head here. Everybody thinks of simplicity in terms of, "Well, rather than write low-level code, people will draw high-level pictures of the actual business process, not that technical plumbing." And, voila! the infrastructure will make it happen, and will be beautiful and the business analysts will drive it.

“Neil alluded to the fact that these high-level business processes, though they can be drawn and developed in BPMN, or using flow charting and all kinds of visual tools, are still ferociously complex. Business process logic is quite complex in it’s own right, and it doesn’t simply get written by the business analyst. Rather, it gets written by teams of business and IT analysts, working hand in hand, in an iterative, painful process to iron out the kinks and then to govern or control changes, over time, to various iterations of these business processes.

“This isn’t getting any simpler. In fact, the whole SOA governance -- the development side of the governance process -- is just an ongoing committee exercise of the IT geeks and the business analyst geeks getting together regularly and fighting it out, defining and redefining these complex flow charts.”

A few minutes later, Dana transitioned to other topical topics, such as recent IBM and Microsoft financials, and also to happenings in the business intelligence (BI), master data management (MDM), and data warehousing spaces—which, being right up my Current Analysis alley—I was also poised to respond to.

Which reminds me, tomorrow (Friday, July 20, 2007) they’ll be discussing recent doings in the DBMS space—specifically, Oracle’s launch of its 11g database—and data integration—specifically, IBM’s acquisition of DataMirror. I’ve just published Current Analysis reports on both happenings. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to join the podcast tomorrow—flying back from the Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software User Conference in Boston. Good stuff—a lot of focus on location intelligence and business geographics and data quality—you’ll see these themes permeate this blog increasingly (with an SOA slant).

Anyway, re the Gardner gang tomorrow, from the pre-podcast email back-and-forth among the likely participants, it looks like they’ll have a lively discussion. Wish I could join--then again, I've already said my piece on all that--let others speak. I’ll have to check out the playback or transcript, like everybody else.

Jim

thenagin The SOA Shrink-Wrapping Metaphor

All:

Then:

http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2007/01/transcript-of-briefingsdirect-soa_28.html

Again:

This was Friday, January 12 of this year….my second appearance on Dana’s roundtable podcast.

At first, I found it an odd juxtaposition of discussion topics, but in retrospect I consider it quite a lovely couplet:

• “The first is the business opportunity for vendors around SOA. How will Wall Street, the City of London, other markets, and investor organizations view SOA as a growth opportunity, and what sort of companies will benefit?”
• “Our second topic is going to be around the recent announcement at Macworld -- and we’re talking about the week of January 8, 2007 -- by Steve Jobs and Apple Inc. of the iPhone, and what this might mean for a mobile front-end: Is it just for consumers? Is there an enterprise aspect to iPhone? And what might be some implications for SOA and composite applications?”

What I love about it is that the first question attempted to nail the relevance of something highly abstract—the SOA paradigm—whereas the second went straight to something very tangible and concrete—which, as we’ve seen, recently occasioned a hula-hoop popular hysteria that played out across all media. Also, what I love about it is that SOA is such an oceanic concept that Dana could easily anchor iPhone—and, if he wished, all kinds of incongruous stuff—to its continental shelf.

On the first question, Dana went first to panelist Trip Chowdhry, an equities analyst, who argued that SOA software suite vendors are unnecessarily complicating their packaging, productization, and go-to-market messages—the phrase he used was “trying to solve complexity with complexity”—with the unfortunate result that “CIOs are now struggling to understand.”

By the time Dana eventually swung over to me, we’d all agreed that SOA is still far too abstract and complex for a Wall Street elevator pitch. And we agreed that both the vendors and the users are still too fuzzy on SOA’s bottom line. I like what Steve Garone had to say (he came right before me): “It’s not clear that either the end users or the providers of technology are able to clearly articulate either of them or have them interoperate -- so to speak -- have them mesh into a coherent vision of what SOA actually is and what it can deliver.”

I know that I myself struggle all the time to explain SOA’s commercial potential in the fewest possible words without dumbing it down. Here is how I hacked away at it when Dana posed the issue to me that January morn:

“Gardner: You would think that a global vendor like SAP would be also enjoying some growth. So, it’s too soon to tell if there is a longer-term trend here. Let’s go over to Jim Kobielus. Jim, do you think that complexity is bad for vendors, good for SIs, and can you think of any types of vendor that might be able to go to Wall Street and say, ‘We’re going to be worth twice as much in two years because of SOA?’

”Kobielus: I’ve joked for many years with people that the more change you have, the more complexity you have, and the more need you have for consultants to come in and explain it all. So, there’s always going to be an opportunity for consultants and analysts to explain what things like SOA are and are not, and what their relevance is to the average business user.

”In terms of whether complexity is bad for vendors or good for vendors, and so forth, let’s take a step back here. In terms of the business opportunities in SOA or that SOA creates, first of all remember that SOA is just an architectural abstraction. How do you shrink wrap and make sexy something that’s just a three letter acronym?

”In terms of differentiating your value prop as a vendor in this market, one of the problem with SOA is that SOA essentially has an architectural approach, smashing and dissolving the ability for vendor lock-in, because everybody is implementing common standards with any-to-any interoperability. So, these SOA universes are getting so multi-vendor and heterogeneous, the complexity can be overwhelming.

”In many ways, the number-one opportunity that SOA presents for vendors are for those vendors that can reduce the complexity by providing SOA suites of software and other components, and secondarily those vendors, those service providers, who can provide SOA and integration best practices to enterprise customers.

”So, how do you shrink-wrap SOA? Well, these suites -- from the likes of SAP/NetWeaver, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, etc. -- implement all the piece-parts of SOA, the portals, the app servers, the databases, and the UDDI registries. Next, the Accentures of the world provide the warm bodies and warm brains of professional services to crunch this complexity down into greater simplicity, and deliver end-to-end integrated solutions that leverage the largesse that an SOA universe provides.”

Oops…I forgot to explicitly close the loop by echoing-then-answering Dana’s question before he sequed to Joe McKendrick…I almost got there…thenagin…..here’s me now doing so:

“Kobielus [july 16 2007]: To answer your question, Dana, the companies that are going to be worth twice as much in two years because of SOA are those that succeed in shrink-wrapping the SOA abstraction through a) comprehensive SOA-enabling software suites, b) prebuilt applications, business rules, data models, integration patterns, etc . that encapsulate horizontal and vertical business processes/content and deep domain expertise, and leverage the underlying SOA suites, and c) the professional services firms that possess the deep domain expertise, have tight relationships with customers, and with SOA suite/tool vendors, so that they can drive the development prebuilt models and apps that deliver on SOA’s promise?”

Yeah…nothing like 20-20 hindsight…or the wisdom of the “I shoulda said that” post-session hallway walk. Also, that’s still far too wordy….I gotta work harder on my SOA elevator pitch.

Or course, selling something as tangible as the iPhone is a snap…especially for a marketing/zeitgeist wizard like Steve Jobs. For him, this yet-to-be-delivered gadget was just a magic wand that he waved brilliantly over our slumbering New Year brains….and look what Jobs hath wrought. In the first weeks of January, the never-seen-or-held iPhone was just as much of an abstraction as SOA—just images on a big screen projected behind him at a tech conference—and thence throughout the planet—and suddenly it became excruciatingly fetishistically tangible in the minds of everybody who worships and perhaps fondles their iPods.

And now it’s quite real. Quite shrink-wrapped. And its elevator pitch is simply the product name itself—a mantra—an abstract, concocted word that functions like concrete poetry--states nothing, implies everything, sketches the object it embodies.

Which reminds me. This triple-haiku from me from several years ago (2002-2003?):

*****************

AN ANALYST’S LISTS

Big bold and sweeping

statements about the weather

sustain our careers.

Overstuffed inbox

ponderings on the latest

shrink-wrapped abstractions.

Disembodied voices

powerpointing plans for

soft world domination.

*****************

No, in the Jan 12 2007 podcast I wasn’t able to tease out any SOA-relevance surrounding this futures topic called iPhone on that particular morning. Or now, for that matter. I like to keep mobile/client-side discussions out of the SOA sphere, which I see as more of a development and integration topic than an access/distribution/delivery topic. SOA is so amoebic it gives me dysentery at times, trying to digest its many….[gross metaphor extension stamped out just in the nick of time]….But you might be interested in knowing how Dana rephrased the iPhone issue when it came to me, and how I responded:

“Gardner: Jim Kobielus, do you see this as taking a step toward that notion of a mobile device that’s closer to a PC but does voice and other things that the enterprise could make good use of?

”Kobielus: Oh yeah, for sure. But I don’t see anything terribly revolutionary in the iPhone, other than the fact that it comes from the Steve Jobs godhead. There’s no doubt that Apple does great design, does a great marketing, and does a great zeitgeist. They made a splash with the Newton and look what happened there. What in the iPhone is not already being used in corporate environments in a major way? People are carrying their iPods into the office and using them to listen to podcasts, or using their cell phones. They’ve already got mobile messaging and mobile browsers in a variety of devices that they’re using.

”Gardner: They use iPods as a mobile storage device, too.

”Kobielus: It's a nice design. I don’t want to sound to flip and cynical about it, but it's one of those things where Apple does a very good job, just like Microsoft does, of getting the average person on the street aware of the fact that we are reaching some sort of a tipping point in terms of putting these things in the hands of the average individual and the average office worker. Quite frankly, I’d like to wait another six to 12 months to see if this gets any traction in the enterprise arena. It probably will, but I don’t think there is anything strongly differentiating this particular client device.”

Then again, there’s never been anything strongly differentiating Coke from Pepsi. Except their relative mind and market shares. That all counts for something, I suppose.

Jim

thenagin The SOA Fungus Metaphor

All:

Then: http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2007/01/transcript-of-briefingsdirect-soa.html

Again:

It’s (sometimes, often, not always) nice to have an exact transcript of my words on a particular occasion. And also good to have the precise words of whoever came immediately before me, and who set me up. Because in retrospect we all tend (or maybe just I tend) to maintain a self-centric memory of an occasion, abstracting away the inconvenient fact that other people were there and that they, not me, were the more important players in that little vignette.

Evidence Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions, who so graciously invited me right after New Year’s Day this year to be a regular panelist in his SOA Insights podcasts involving leading SOA analysts from various firms. I had barely known Dana at that point (I believe we met in an airport in 2006, coming back from some IT show somewhere—can’t remember the particulars of that occasion—airports cities and shows tend to blur).

My first SOA Insights was on Friday, January 5 of this year. It was with Dana, Steve Garone, Joe McKendrick, and Tony Baer (none of whom I knew before then, but all of whom impressed me with being more deserving of the “leading SOA analyst” title than myself….no, not false modesty….I’m an SOA analyst, all right, but my coverage area has shifted since my Burton Group years away from the application infrastructure focus of most of these folks toward data management…under which SOA is an important theme, but which takes me in different directions from the others…such as Semantic Web…which explains in why I felt inclined to throw that topic into the panel in April…and, of course, explains that just-finished ten-week blogthread).

Anyway, back to the podcast on January 5. Dana usually, a day or two before the event, e-mails the participants a sketchy list of possible topics he’ll bring up, and he did that week. His number one topic was the “ROI of SOA”—a first-podcast topic that, fortunately for me, was like lobbing a clean fastball through the sweet spot of my strike zone—I had published an article on that very topic in Network World in October 2005, and I had my print-out of the original manuscript, including a symbolic SOA mesh-like drawing I was inordinately proud of, in front of me as I spoke to the world that January morning.

I already had my remarks mapped out in my head when Dana turned virtually toward me to set me up. In the following excerpt from the transcript of that podcast, notice that Dana lead in with a “root system” metaphor, which I wasn’t expecting. Notice how I then, in a eureka moment of which I’m also inordinately proud, morphed Dana’s metaphor into another metaphor—SOA as fungus--that has since that time struck a responsive chord with a bunch of folks across cyberspace (as gleaned through my daily reading and occasional self-Googling):

************************************

“Gardner: I’ve spoken to HP and IBM as well, and they’re really undergoing IT transformation, probably business transformation, and there are many constituent parts to that, of which SOA is one. But SOA is one that has, I suppose, a lot of interdependencies and effects across many of these other activities, whether it’s server consolidation, application modernization, IT shared services, virtualization and what have you.

”Let’s go over to Jim. Jim, if SOA is important, almost like a root system that cuts across a number of different trees that are growing, is it even worthwhile measuring it, or should people just be smart enough to recognize that this is the right thing to do?

”Kobielus: That’s an interesting metaphor there -- SOA as a root system. My visual image of SOA is a very complex hyper-mesh. In other words, like a root system, where you have tendrils going hither and yon, the tendrils being simply interactions among services and client.

”It’s very worthwhile to measure the ROI of SOA as a paradigm or an approach for enabling and for maximizing the sharing and reuse and interoperability of distributed resources across your network. You make an investment as an organization, as an enterprise, and in this approach you want to know whether you’re investing your funds and your resources wisely. When I think of SOA’s ROI, I think of two numbers, and those numbers are 100 and zero.

”As we know, SOA focuses on how you maximize the sharing and reuse of services, of application functionality and resources. In other words, how do you enable a 100 percent reuse as a nirvana? We’ll never get there, but in any given organization, 100 percent reuse, service reuse, first and foremost is a consolidation topic. What that means is, if you do SOA right, you’re doing much more with much less.

”You’re able to consolidate redundant silos of application functionality and data throughout the organization. You’re able to consolidate fewer software licenses and servers, with the associated translation and cost savings and capital on operating budgets, fewer redundant software components and so forth. The need for fewer programming groups, as we can consolidate that as well.

”So 100 percent reuse is the nirvana. The zero comes in the sense that, if you’re doing SOA right, the marginal cost of billing the next application drops pretty close to zero. You’re able to reuse everything that’s already been built. You do not have to reinvent the wheel. So, basically, a 100 percent reuse means zero marginal cost of building the next application. Of course, as I said, you enable that vision through consolidation, both in software and hardware, and in programming teams, and so forth.

”So, once again, getting back to your root-system-and-tree metaphor, SOA becomes this ubiquitous root system from which new sprigs can pop up, without needing to lay down their own root system. Rather they are simply branches on a huge underground system. In [the] northern [part of the state of] Michigan, where I’m from [btw, I'm originally from southern Michigan...born in Jackson...grew up in Livonia...a suburb of Detroit....left there a quarter-century ago], scientists have discovered the world’s largest organism as a mushroom or a fungus of some sort that spans 30, 40, or 50 square miles. They determined though DNA analysis that it's the exact same individual and has got the largest biomass in the world. In essence -- and it’s all underground pretty much. That’s what SOA is all about, essentially all the services in an SOA sort of share a common DNA.

”Gardner: Well, there’s the message we need to take to the CEOs and the CFOs. Let’s make our IT like a fungus.

Kobielus: I think they probably already believe that!”

************************************

Boy, am I glad we didn’t deep-end on that metaphor: it can quickly lead to some disparaging, distracting, downright dirty connotations. Later on in that session, we all morphed together into an SOA-as-movie-studio metaphor (by way of Dana morphing fungus to amoeba, and then amoeba to plumbing, and then plumbing to architecture, and then architecture to soundstage, and then soundstage to movie studio—I’m too impatient to get to the point of this new blogpost—does anybody care enough to go back to the transcript and double-check the sequence of images?..you don’t?...don’t worry…hold on, gotta give Tony Baer credit for taking it to the movie studio metaphor, which is where I picked up developing it further then, and will do so “again” presently).

First, here’s me “then”:

************************************

“Kobielus: I’m going to take this movie industry metaphor out of the realm of metaphor into the actuality of, teams becoming very SOA-focused in terms of the actual production ... A mashup is reusing existing components of service -- content -- whatever into new vehicles or new compositions. If you look at the content that’s being developed out there in the IT world, more of it's getting built through various types of mashups, which is very much an instantiation of the SOA paradigm into a different world -- not the software world so much as the normal cultural world that we all inhabit.”

************************************

Now, me now:

This feeds nicely into how I approach SOA as the principal analyst for data management at Current Analysis. Fundamentally, as I’ve told many people on many occasions over the past few years:

• SOA is a paradigm for maximizing the reuse, sharing, and interoperability of precious resources over distributed fabrics.
• For any organization, one of the most precious resources is the master data—the official, single-version-of-truth, recordkeeping data--on which they run the business.
• Consequently, the life-cycle governance of that master data—and of the distributed services for extracting, transforming, and loading; for profiling, cleansing, and enhancing; for consolidating, controlling, and versioning; for accessing, distributing, delivering, and mashing up that master data—is one of the most critical applications of SOA in the corporate world.
• Hence, master data management (MDM) is SOA in the sphere of data management—lifecycle governance of that sprawling fungus, amoeba, aquifer, grotto, or whatever called SOA—governance of the master data, of all of the myriad, sundry, and sordid means by which it all gets mashed up—and acquires meaning, either at the source through careful composition—or in the intermediate re-interpretations or recontextualizations—or the emergent process by which meaning blurs, distorts, or opaques through progressive deconstruction or regressive decomposition somewhere across that universal producinogenic fungus….
• For that’s what fungi do, here on this earth….
  

They decompose and consume every last sentient thing.

Jim

imho Ocean Semantic.............._

All:

Ah, coast sweet coast.

Hey, the coast is clear for me. I think I'm clear on what Semantic Web, semantic interoperability, ontologies, taxonomies, folksonomies, and all that are all about, and why they're important. But not everybody is clear on the concept of concept-based data modeling, search, integration, etc.

And the people who still don't see the point of it all are in the vast majority of the IT world. They're not stupid, of course, but are justifiably skeptical of a semantic wave that's been taking far too long to cross the SOA ocean.

Case in point: Bill Inmon, the guy who continues to be the father figure and best-practices prophet for the data warehousing universe. Check out what Bill said last month: "I admit it. When it comes to semantics, I don’t just get it. You can call me misguided, an old fuddy duddy, or just plain dumb. In one way or another, perhaps all of those names fit. But at the end of the day, I just don’t understand semantics."

Let's be clear on what Bill was saying. It's not that he doesn't understand what semantics is or is not--it's just that he fails to see what value-added the "Semantic Web" adds over and above traditional approaches to semantic integration. Inmon at length:

"One branch of semantics I looked into with great interest was ontologies. Having done some cursory work in the field in my own software development, I thought that surely here was a value proposition. But no. At least, I couldn’t find it.

"Then I looked at semantic logic. Now semantic logic is quite interesting. It reminds me of a really good crossword puzzle – the kind I like to take on flights between Europe and the U.S. But while semantic logic is interesting, how it applies to any business problem is beyond me. No luck here.

"Then I looked at linguistics. This was perhaps the biggest disappointment of all. Linguistics has been around for years. There have been countless hours of research and countless government grants in the field of linguistics for a long time now (at least 30 years). And where is the business problem that is being addressed by linguistics? Certainly it is nowhere on a large scale. It is true that there are some small startup efforts that make use of linguistic technology. But after thirty years of research, you would think that there would be a lot more technology on the table – a lot more proof in the pudding."

I quote Inmon at length not to agree with him so much as to point out the degree of intellectual fatigue implicit in his comments. Immersing yourself in this sometimes shiny, often briny, occasionally nonspecific ocean of academic and technologic goodies can be suffocating. I chose to test the waters simply because I realized that Semantic Web is slowly inundating the coastline in EII, ECM, BI, DQ, MDM, ESB, and other of my core coverage areas. Also, further investigation of this space has been one of my back-burner personal/professional/intellectual to-dos since 2004 when, in another professional context, I was actively discouraged from going there. Had to go there. 'Twas quite good, this time around, that my podcast colleagues (Dana Gardner, Dave Linthicum, Tony Baer, Joe McKendrick, et al.) at www.briefingsdirect.com were quite agreeable, amenable, and ideational on this topic, and chose to go there with me. Linthicum, in particular, is an expert himself on the matter, and was a major inspiration and launching point for my random-swim through this specific sea these past two months.

From a blogfodder standpoint, one of things I like about Semantic Web is that one can pretty much connect it to anything one wishes on a philosophic, ontologic, metaphysic, technologic, or sociologic level. What a wonderful context, all this semantic, for this old boy to wax pedantic. I almost wanted to truck into it all a meditation on Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the distinction between "things in themselves" (i.e., true ontology--the study of the objective ground of reality and being) and "things as they appear" (i.e., phenomenology--the study of the subjective apprehension of reality and being)--and to note that Semantic Web "ontologies" are in fact simply an "a posteriori" analytic practical prescriptive institutional instrumental consensus on "things (e.g., subjects, predicates, objects, entities, instances, classes, groups, relationships, attributes) as they appear" to a semantic governance authority within some semantic domain--not actually the sort of "a priori" synthetic metaphysic revelation apprehension of the ineffable root of things that Kant said he had no problem accepting as a possible article of faith but saw as essentially a futile field of unverifiable undecidable propositions outside the sphere of pure reason, which Kant essentially aligned with scientific process of progressive societal construction of an interlinking system of empirically verifiable statements through the building and testing of interpretive frameworks through controlled observations--almost wanted to note that the linguistic concept of "semantics" is a subset, not the sum total of "meaning," since language is an instrument of human intention and any statement can be understood as much in terms of its "pragmatics" (e.g., the explicit or implicit, interior or ulterior motives and objectives that shape and direct it) as it is in terms of its "semantics," which concern the role of language as depicting objects in the objective/real and/or subjective/imaginary world as worthy of our contemplation, and of course, this same language can also be understood as conveying meaning on the level of "poetics," which doesn't so much mean you have to get into William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens but rather have to realize that language is itself an object worthy of our contemplation, and that language, this object-in-itself, is memorable only to the degree that the concocter of said bonmots has consciously or otherwise wielded all the communicative devices of good composition, parallelism, grammar, wordchoice, alliteration, tintinnabulation, emotion, tone, guided imagery, etc to make the language itself, and hopefully the semantic objects and pragmatic objectives contained therein compelling and worth our while dwelling therein and upon--but that would be pedantic.

Hey, check out the work of the W3C Emotion Incubator Group ("a general-purpose emotion annotation and representation language). And consider the growing text-analytics-industry implementation of semantic "voice" (e.g., "Voice of the Customer"--see what Attensity, Clarabridge, and others are doing in this sphere) , which is essentially something capable of being extracted as a component of the human "sentiments," moods intentions and propensities, that lie latent in unstructured colloquial text.

In the Social Semantic Web, meaning may be measured in the meandering moods of masses meditating on mashups.

All for now.

Jim

imho Ocean Semantic..............

All:

Recently, I came across the "2007 Semantic Web Challenge" at the O'Reilly XML Blog (http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/07/2007_semantic_web_challenge.html). They're asking for "cool" applications of ontologies etc. to "illustrate to society what the Semantic Web can provide."

For a Semantic Web "killer app" that pretty much everybody understands intuitively, the judges of this contest should focus on semantic search. As noted earlier, semantic search already accounts for a large share of the commercial implementations of ontologies, RDF/OWL, text analytics, and so forth. It searches by concepts, not mere text strings, leveraging ontologies to speed searches, make them more accurate, and weed out spurious hits. It points to a future where Googling delivers you to the exact, correct, complete answer to your natural-language questions with each and every query. "I'm Feeling Lucky"? Hah, that's so Web 1.0!

To a great extent, search is the killer app for both the SOA Semantic Web (see previous paragraph, and post of June 6, 2007 in this thread) and the Social Semantic Web (see following paragraphs, and that same June 6 post).

As regards the Social Semantic Web, this term primarily refers to "social networking," "social bookmarking," and "folksonomy" initiatives such as Del.icio.us, Digg, and Reddit. These and brethren/sustren "Web 2.0" phenomena are online communities within which users may collectively link, tag, classify, and comment on Web content originated elsewhere (however, usually without reference to W3C SOA Semantic Web specifications such as RDF/OWL etc). The key difference between the SOA Semantic Web and these Social Semantic Web efforts is that the former relies primarily on professional developers to create and maintain standards-based ontologies, whereas the latter relies on end users to create informal, non-standard collections of descriptive tags that apply to content they find while surfing the Web.

Fundamentally, though, the entire Social Semantic Web universe is a big, distributed, human-powered search engine. The core features of any search engine are to crawl, correlate, and rate content originated elsewhere. Traditional search engines do this with spiders, whereas Social Semantic Web communities accomplish the same end through surfers (or possibly, it's a "botts" vs. "butts" distinction, but I digress). Just as no single spider-powered engine can crawl everything in the universe all the time and place it all in every conceivable context for every potential searcher, no single "social bookmarking" community can be a be-all boddhisatva of semantic salvation.

Choose your ontological oracle, so you can search and surf the ocean semantic, always in clear sight of some comfortable contextual coastline.

One to come.

Jim

imho Ocean Semantic………….

All:

Semantics is just a fancy word for understanding what things truly mean.

Semantic Web is the “identity of things” taken to its logical extreme. I keep coming back to that thought. In this discipline, the core question is: Do two (or more) phenomenologically distinct content instances refer, ontologically, to the same "thing" (aka "subject" or "entity")? And Semantic Web's core grammar is, of course, RDF, which is built on the notion that we can define meaningful ontological statements as consisting of discrete “subjects,” “predicates,” and “objects,” and that each of those "parts of speech" (my term) is itself a thing that can be given its own unique identity, designated with a URI, within an RDF triple. Every source or target content thing/subject can have its own identity/URI, as can every attribute/predicate-value of that thing/subject. In the process of determining semantic equivalence between two phenomenologically distinct semantic content instances (i.e., things such as customer records from separate applications or databases), our inference engines resolve them to a single thing defined under a common, shared ontology (defined in RDF/OWL). In other words, resolve (match, merge, reconcile) distinct things down to a single unique name—same semantics means, memetically, the same meaningful things, heteronymously, are tamed to assume the same names—Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

That’s the Semantic Web (it’s also the core function of the data quality space—in, which, near as I can tell, the only vendor doing semantic web at this moment is Silver Creek Systems). Now, here’s something I wrote in this blog on February 10, 2005, in a different context (referencing ID Dataweb architectures built on XRI—a URI-based identification scheme):

“[W]hat the heck does the ‘identity of things’ refer to? On one level, it sounds like some metaphysical plane of existence, some mythical spirit world, some platonic ideal, like the ‘secret life of plants’ or the ‘lifestyles of the rich and famous.’ Like animism: the identities/souls of the inanimate starstuff from which we’re all, magically, composed….

broad scope of the term, in terms of concrete, real-world, commercial technical approaches, such as IP addressing, RFID, and ID dataweb. …..

That’s one of the big problems with the ‘identity of things.’ There are just too many ‘things’ in the universe. Try giving every star in the sky its own unique name, including the billions upon billions embedded in galaxies, and don’t forget to give each of the countless galaxies their own unique names. After identifying every discrete point of light uniquely, now try storing and managing all those names (plus the associated descriptive attributes of each star) in some master directory database in the sky. Clearly, the directory itself would have sufficiently massive gravitation to form its own black hole, sucking all of the named ‘objects’ in the universe down into some freaky meta-universe, never to be heard from again. ….

ID dataweb—aka federated resource sharing environments built on emerging Web services standards, especially Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) and XRI Data Interchange (XDI). …

ID dataweb (actually, there are many synonyms for this emerging space—I’m partial to ‘federated resource sharing’) is an approach under which every data element in every database can conceivably be given a unique, fine-grained identifier—thanks to XRI, which is backward-compatible with the URI/URN naming scheme that has achieved ubiquity on the Web……the World Wide Web was built on the ‘identity of things’ (aka pages, scripts, etc.), leveraging URI, DNS, and IP. …

ID dataweb is an environment within which autonomous data domains can choose to selectively grant fine-grained data-access rights to external parties—and unilaterally rescind those rights. It leverages the identity federation and trust infrastructure being implemented everywhere through open standards such as WS-Security, SAML, Liberty Alliance, and others. It’s a standards-based flexible way of securely setting up and managing as-needed data-integration connections between autonomous organizations. Such as manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and other participants in a supply chain. Or financial services firms engaging in dynamic partnering on equities underwritings. And so forth. Data integration/exchange/transfer is one of the principal tasks in any B2B collaborative-commerce partnering…..

Here’s an issue that the ID dataweb community must grapple with: As organizations expose/share/protect more of their fine-grained data resources through XRI/XDI, how are they going to manage the massive databases underlying the humongous ‘directories of things’ that result."

Maybe we should call it “thing-centric identity,” to adapt a phrase from my just-previous multi-month multi-post meditation. Is an RDF triple store the nucleus of that "directory of things"? How big will triple stores need to grow to encompass the universe of semantic things? At some point, will these stores grow so large as to mash it all gravitationally, resolve it all ontologically, down into a semantically massive and mighty thingularity?

More to come.

Jim

imho Ocean Semantic............

All:


************
MEME

meaning is modeled
mined and mashed, coming somehow,
emerging among.

************

More to come.

Jim

imho Ocean Semantic………..

All:

Now, it’s clear from my research that the Semantic Web community cannot be neatly split into two camps. If you look at the work ongoing at those “pure plays” in my previous post, much of it spans both the “SOA Semantic Web” and “Social Semantic Web.”

In other words, today’s Semantic Web vendor-community ferment combines bits of the former approach (explicit modeling, controlled vocabularies, deterministic mediation) with elements of the latter (implicit modeling, uncontrolled vocabularies, probabilistic mediation). Or, if you will, the leading edge blends the onto-taxo school of top-down meaning modeling (i.e., taxonomies, RDF, OWL, etc.) with the linguo-extracto strain of bottom-up meaning mining (i.e., NLP, text analytics, etc.).

At a coarse level, my semantics maturity model is mapping well to the varied architectures/approaches/tooling of these dozens of providers, but I’m not trying to force-fit anything to that framework. I'm still trying to work through the practical distinctions between "semantic integration" and "semantic quality" components (where do "inference engines " fall?). Rather, I’m trying to understand everything on its own terms, and carefully, painstakingly work my way toward a grand re-synthesis.

Sorting through the field of Semantic Web “pure plays” from my previous list, I realize now that it was a bit too inclusive. In that quick/handy list, I lumped semantics academic research programs (e.g., Advanced Knowledge Technologies, Digital Enterprise Research Institute), semantics open source communities (e.g., Liminal Systems, SemWebCentral), semantics consulting shops (e.g., Articulate Software, Business Semantics, Mindful Data, Pragati Synergetic Research, Semantic Arts, Semantic Light, Taxonomy Strategies, Zepheira), and a semantics broker (e.g., Taxonomy Warehouse). Some of the names on that list left me scratching my head wondering whether they actually exist or what the heck they actually do (e.g., MetaWeb, Ontologent, Ontomantics, Semaview, VivoMind Intelligence). Many vendors are not semantics specialists, but, rather incorporate semantics features into AI tools, content/document management, identity/security management solutions, graphics, desktop productivity applications, or other products (e.g., Crystal Semantics, ExpertMaker, Franz, Garlik, LinkSpace, Semtation, WordMap). And, of course, there are the many semantic search vendors (e.g., Aduna, AskMeNow, Cha-Cha, Cognition Technologies, Conversa, Copernic, Endeca, FAST Search and Transfer, Google, Groxis, Hakia, Intelliseek, ISYS Search Software, Metacarta, Ontosearch, Powerset, Readware, Textdigger, Vivisimo, ZoomInfo).

I’m not doubting that they all have unique and innovative approaches and so forth, but I’m looking for pure-play solution vendors that provide semantics tools/platforms to support a broad range of applications. With that as criteria, I’ve boiled my short list down to a still-unwieldy twenty-three. They are Axontologic, Cycorp, Fourthcodex, Gnowsis, Metatomix, Modus Operandi, Mondeca, Ontology Works, Ontopia, Ontoprise, Ontos AG, Revelytix, Sandpiper Software, Semagix, Semandex Networks, Semansys, Semantic Insights, Semantic Research, Semantra, Siderean, Thetus, TopQuadrant, and XSB.

One sweet little payoff for me so far in my research is seeing the early footprint of Semantic Web technology into the enterprise information integration (EII)—aka data federation—space. If you go back to the second post in this ongoing thread (i.e,. the one in which there are a mere two dots after “imho Ocean Semantic”), you’ll see that this meandering inquiry began with a few burning (rhetorical and non-rhetorical) questions:

• How is [SOA-enabled EII solutions’ semantic-abstraction layers from such vendors as IBM, BEA, Business Objects, Informatica, Sybase, Actuate, Composite Software, Ipedo, Inetsoft, and MetaMatrix] not the Semantic Web?
• Do any of these commercial solutions depend on any of the core specs (i.e., RDF, OWL) usually associated with the W3C's flavor of Semantic Web?
• Does Red Hat's decision to acquire MetaMatrix, open-source its EII technology, and bundle it with the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite represent a critical step toward making SOA-enabled EII (i.e, semantic Web) ubiquitous?
  

Funny you should ask, Jim. As it turns out, check out Revelytix, which has provided a Semantic Web layer for Red Hat/MetaMatrix’s EII environment, to wit:

• “[Revelytix] MatchIT, a component of the MetaMatrix Semantic Data Services product, provides automated semantic mapping technology to aid domain experts in more quickly reconciling the semantics across a dispersed information environment. MatchIT, an extensible ontology-driven tool using RDF and OWL, implements a variety of sophisticated algorithms for determining semantic equivalence. It leverages the Semantic Data Services defined within the MetaMatrix designer to aid in more rapid deployment of a mediation solution by automatically exposing potential semantic matches.”
  

Also, check out Modus Operandi, whose solution does something similar for BEA’s EII solution (AquaLogic Data Services Platform)—viz:

• “[Modus Operandi] Wave Semantic Data Services Layer gives discoverable meaning to data by linking data services to an ontology. Wave enhances the BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform with the tools to semantically integrate information across the enterprise. A Wave data services layer in a SOA supports flexible, user-driven ad hoc queries and semantic search….Wave makes use of an ontology (or conceptual model) to unify and resolve semantic conflicts among data sources. At runtime, the Wave web service provides the data service layer’s API (Application Programming Interface) for discovering, querying, and searching the integrated information via the ontology. Wave also includes runtime services to crawl and index data services, to visualize the integrated data, and to monitor data services status….Launched from a BEA WebLogic Workshop menu, the Wave Importer transforms an OWL file to data service templates that map directly to classes and properties found in the ontology. You can use any ontology development environment that produces a standard OWL output. Wave semantic data services are activated by deploying to the WebLogic Server.”

Interestingly, none of the EII vendor provides this Semantic Web capability themselves yet. All rely on third-parties to provide it through add-ons.

All of which underlines my point about the Semantic Web space being several years from maturity. And all of which indicates that a lot of major EII vendors are going to make some strategic acquisitions in the Semantic Web community before long. This technology must be integrated into enterprises’ basic data services platforms before the Semantic Web can be truly ubiquitous.

More to come.

Jim

imho Ocean Semantic..........

All:

Here's a quick hit of my evolving taxonomy of the SOA Semantic Web market, based on ongoing navigation of the ocean semantic.

First off, it's clear to me that the primary use cases for the SOA Semantic Web so far--in terms of vendor activity and enterprise deployment--are in:

• (semantic) search
• (semantic) text mining/analytics
• (semantic) content and knowledge management
• (semantic) enterprise information integration

I put the parentheses around (semantic) for a reason: this (i.e., ontologies, RDF, OWL, etc.) is a new approach that established vendors in those segments are pursuing, plus a growing range of pure-plays. Semantic-oriented search is the hottest of all the segments, judging by the number of startups and others pitching product/service right now....here's a quick list: Aduna, AskMeNow, Cha-Cha, Cognition Technologies, Conversa, Copernic, Endeca, FAST Search and Transfer, Google, Groxis, Hakia, Intelliseek, ISYS Search Software, Metacarta, Ontosearch, Powerset, Readware, Textdigger, Vivisimo, and ZoomInfo.

Well, not so quick a list...but mind-blowing, considering how many of these companies weren't around this time last year....or may be defunct by this time next year....or swept up in furious M&A activity...or huge and rich beyond believe....or still waiting for their ship to come in.

But even more mind-blowing is the current, active list of SOA Semantic Web pure-plays that are more than point solutions for one or more semantic use cases (e.g., search)...but are providers of the ontology modeling tools, ontology inference servers, ontology repositories, and other underlying semanto/onto/taxo componentry for a broad swath of use cases--to wit:

• Advanced Knowledge Technologies: http://www.aktors.org/akt/
• Articulate Software: http://www.articulatesoftware.com/
• Axontologic: http://www.axontologic.com/
• Business Semantics: http://www.businesssemantics.com/
• Crystal Semantics: http://www.crystalsemantics.com/
• Cycorp: http://www.cyc.com/
• DATA-GRID: http://www.data-grid.com/
• Digital Enterprise Research Institute: http://www.deri.ie/
• ExpertMaker: http://www.expertmaker.com/
• Fourthcodex: http://www.fourthcodex.com/
• Franz: http://www.franz.com/
• Garlik: http://www.garlik.com/
• Gnowsis: http://www.gnowsis.org/
• Liminal Systems: http://www.liminalzone.org/
• LinkSpace: http://www.linkspace.net/
• Metatomix: http://www.metatomix.com/
• MetaWeb: http://www.metaweb.com/
• Modus Operandi: http://www.modusoperandi.com/
• Mindful Data: http://www.mindfuldata.com/
• Mondeca: http://www.mondeca.com/
• Ontologent: http://www.ontologent.com/
• Ontology Works: http://www.ontologyworks.com/
• Ontomantics: http://www.ontomantics.com/
• Ontopia: http://www.ontopia.net/
• Ontoprise: http://www.ontoprise.de/content/index_eng.html
• Ontos AG: http://www.ontos.com/de/company/index.php
• Pragati Synergetic Research: http://www.pragati-inc.com/index.html
• Revelytix: http://revelytix.com/
• Sandpiper Software: http://www.sandsoft.com/
• Semagix: http://www.semagix.com/technology.html
• Semandex Networks: http://www.semandex.com/
• Semansys: http://www.semansys.com/
• Semantic Arts: http://www.semanticarts.com/
• Semantic Insights: http://www.semanticinsights.com/
• Semantic Light: http://www.semanticlight.com/
• Semantic Research: http://www.semanticresearch.com/
• Semantra: http://www.semantra.com/
• Semaview: http://www.semaview.com/
• Semtation GmBH: http://www.semtation.de/
• SemWebCentral: http://projects.semwebcentral.org/
• Siderean: http://www.siderean.com/
• Taxonomy Strategies: http://www.taxonomystrategies.com/
• Taxonomy Warehouse: http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com/
• Thetus: http://www.thetus.com/
• TopQuadrant: http://www.topquadrant.com/
• VivoMind Intelligence: http://www.vivomind.com/
• Wordmap: http://www.wordmap.com/
• XSB: http://www.xsb.com/
• Zepheira: http://zepheira.com/

Of course, they're all quite different from each other in their strategies, competencies, solution portfolio, partnerships, target markets, funding, prospects for success, etc. In terms of how their solutions map to my SOA Semantic Web maturity model....well....the mapping is going on as I speak (perhaps even as I sleep...can't get this topic out of my head...not even for a night...this endless notion keeps on sloshing from ear to shining ear).

More to come.

Jim

imho Ocean Semantic.........

All:

I've been putting together an SOA Semantic Web maturity model. I'm trying to create a reference framework that can help me sort through the confusion, complexity, and diversity of solutions/components/tools in this market.

In developing the framework, I've been working from a basic principle: SOA. In other words, SOA refers fundamentally to a paradigm that focuses on maximizing the reuse, sharing, and standards-based interoperability of key resources over distributed environments. In an SOA context, then, we can conceive of semantics (of data, services, apps, business processes, etc.) as perhaps the most important resource that must be shared. Hence the "SOA Semantic Web."

I already have a recently developed SOA framework that gets me 90 percent of the way there. It's the master data management (MDM) maturity model that is the conceptual backbone of my MDM market coverage for Current Analysis. You can see how I use that maturity model to compare/contrast MDM vendors' solution sets (e.g., IBM, Oracle, Teradata, TIBCO, SAS/DataFlux etc.) if you go to www.currentanalysis.com and subscribe to my Data Management module (hey....I told you I make a living somehow...this is an explicit plug for my bread-and-butter). That MDM maturity model includes an explicit notion of "governance" of this resource (i.e., master data) within a "domain" according to a "domain model." I find these notions essential to understanding how a vocabulary (i.e., ontology) is controlled within a Semantic Web environment.

To some degree, if we use the word "semantic" in place of "data" in the maturity model (and make a variety of other conceptual tweaks to keep it real), we have a useful SOA Semantic Web maturity model. To wit:

*******************************

• Semantic Integration: These consist of all tools, runtime components, and services needed to retrieve, extract, and move semantic objects (i.e., data and metadata) from origin repositories; parse, validate, mediate, infer (deterministic and/or probabilistic) mappings among the semantic objects; transform the semantic objects; and deliver the semantic objects to target repositories, applications, services, users, and other consumers.

• Semantic Quality: These consist of all tools, runtime components and services needed to discover and profile source semantic objects; validate, mediate, de-duplicate, match, merge and cleanse those objects ; and enhance, enrich and augment it with additional, related objects.

• Semantic Repositories: These consist of all tools, runtime components, and services needed to organize, index, store, query and administer structured semantic objects; consolidate structured semantic objects into subject/topic-oriented, integrated, non-volatile and time-variant repositories under unified governance; and govern its controlled distribution to various target repositories, applications, services, users, and other consumers.

• Semantic Domain Models: These consist of all prebuilt master semantic governance objects (metadata, schemas, ontologies, glossaries, and vocabularies), plus semantic governance infrastructure that a semantic domain authority uses to administer the semantics of a particular process, platform, or other solution domain (e.g., MDM, data warehousing, enterprise content management, enterprise information integration, enterprise service bus, business intelligence) of a horizontal, vertical, B2B, organization-specific, regional, or other deployment scenario.

• Semantic Modeling and Mapping: These consist of all tools necessary to create business and technical definitions of master semantic domain models; discover, author, design, develop, index, query, visualize, browse, modify, version-control, access-control, import/export, and/or cross-reference one or more semantically distinct master data sets; and define and manage hierarchies, mappings and transformations among master semantic objects.

• Semantic Governance: This encompasses all repositories (metadata, ontology, policy etc.); collaboration environments (workflow, task management, exception handling, event-driven alerting, calendar-driven reminders, priority escalation etc.); controls (authentication, authorization, mapping/translation, version, validation, monitoring, auditing etc.); and other tools, components and services necessary to define, approve and administer domain models—including rules governing semantic integration, quality, and repositories--upon which semantic interoperability environments depend. This is sometimes known as a “semantic stewardship” environment.

*******************************

Yeah...that seems about right....handy....I'm just about to launch into the Semantic Web vendor/product/market survey segment of my research for my upcoming BCR feature article on the topic.

I sorta feel I have a decent enough map of this jungle (though no map marks the quicksand that no doubt is everywhere).

More to come.

Jim

imho Ocean Semantic........

All:

I'm not sure if the questions I posed at the end of the previous post (or next one, depending on whether you're reading present to past down from the top, or up, in chronological order, from the bottom) are provocative, or simply stupid: Why doesn't W3C take up defining standards for the Social Semantic Web? And what would those standards be?

Maybe "stupid" is too harsh on my precious self--perhaps "overreaching" is a better word. Why fence the young frontier of the Social Semantic Web by calling for standards prematurely? And why even give this phenomenon a special name all its own, implying that it somehow deserves consideration equal to the OWL-ish Semantic Web stuff being hammered out at W3C? Is there anything truly new going on in all this “folksonomy” and “Web 2.0” stuff that deserves to be considered under the Semantic Web big top?

Universal standards are, of course, the foundation of this thing called the World Wide Web and the SOA universe from which, apparently, the Semantic Web is bursting forth. You’ll recall that I characterized the W3C Semantic Web as the SOA Semantic Web, due to its reliance on the SOA standards (especially the nouveau XML-based Web services standards), while noting that the W3C specs implement some core principles: explicit semantic modeling, controlled semantic vocabularies, and deterministic semantic mediation.

At that point in my analysis, it was a straightforward exercise to point out that some semantics-oriented efforts come down on the opposite ends of each spectrum: implicit semantic modeling, uncontrolled semantic vocabularies, and probabilistic semantic mediation. All of which seems to characterize the chaotic colloquial collaborative linguistic social semantic space we all inhabit on the World Wide Web. Hence, the “Social Semantic Web.”

But doesn’t the very notion of standards call for everything that the Social Semantic Web is not: explicit models of meaning, control over official vocabularies in which meanings are expressed, and clearcut mappings among divergent formulations that express the same underlying meaning? How can standards nail down anything that is inherently implicit, uncontrolled, probabilistic, piggly-wiggly, loosey-goosey…..?

So maybe the notion of standards in this space isn’t feasible. And maybe the notion that we’re actually talking about a new “space” is a tad off the mark. Why give it a new name to imply that something radically new is going on, when--it occurred to me—the whole “Social Semantic Web” is just the good ol’ World Wide Web chugging away at what it’s been doing since the start.

Essentially, the foundation principle of the World Wide Web—and “Web 2.0”--is: any entity can link to, recontextualize, and render commentary on any aggregation of content originated by any other entity anywhere.

That’s what hypertext environments such as the Web are all about. That’s the foundation of HTML, HTTP, URIs, etc. (the most critical standards for the “Social Semantic Web”).

That’s what Web sites and portals do.

Search engines too (human- and/or bot-indexed, based on informal or formal rules that prioritize/classify/contextual all crawlable content with something resembling meaning, relevance, etc.).

Blogs too (on occasion….my “fyi” posts include the link to the kontent on which I’m ostensibly kommenting….my “imho” posts are just me shooting from the hip).

Blogrolls (e.g., hey, if you’ve got nothing better to do browse to these 124 blogs written by people I may have never met or even looked at their posts but they have some general affinity with me hence bolster my claim to being plugged into some cool virtual community that absolutely rules in some virtual sense).

Wikis too (usually….they can also be one entity implicitly commenting on another by totally obliterating that other’s last comment).

Social bookmarking sites for sure (e.g., “digg” these 872 external webpages I like and my sketchy comments and flurry of vague tags explaining why I think they’re individually or collectively worthy of your perusal).

Social networking arenas of all shapes and sizes are cross-commentary cliques par excellence, thick with mutual, sometimes antagonistic, contextualization. Isn't that what a flame war is all about at heart? The nasty side of the Social Semantic Web--the tooth-and-nail fight for heads, hearts, souls, and curly hairs.

Maybe it’s a tad pretentious to refer to this to-and-fro mishmash of chaotic cross-commentary as a “Social Semantic Web,” which implies that something resembling coherent meaning is emerging from the bubbling brew (sometimes it feels more like a Semantic Warp, where you’re more confused coming out than you were going in). To the extent that the Social Semantic Web can precipitate anything of value from the warp, it’s up to each user to navigate the mess, filter the firehose, extract what they find interesting, and synthesize some coherent point to it all. Maybe they’ll lean on their data/text/content mining tools to aggregate, filter, categorize, classify, and render it all for them in pretty pictures that make sense of it all. Or maybe they’ll call for analysts or other smart people who have a knack for standing above the cloud and seeing patterns that others are still having trouble bringing into focus.

Analysts, synthesists, smart people….the pivotal social intermediaries….stitching together the meanings explicit or implicit in any knowledge domain…the key connectors in the human web or any other environment in which individuals must somehow collectively navigate an ocean thick with their own semantic plankton....the world wide warp.

More to come.

Jim

imho Ocean Semantic.......

All:

Semantic interoperability is the wrong term for this space—or, rather, it’s an OK term, but the word “interoperability” in this context implies that the semantic understandings are purely application-to-application. It implies that the semantic ontologies are meant to be purely machine-readable—hence, RDF/OWL and so forth.

Semantic Web is also the wrong term—or rather, it’s OK too, but the word “Web” implies that, like the World Wide Web, it applies primarily in application-to-person use cases, such as search engines.

But this latter term—Semantic Web—is the one on everybody’s lips, so we’ll have to make our peace with it. It wouldn’t do anybody ('cept jim) any good to rename the space just to suit one analyst. We’ll need to keep emphasizing that Semantic Web refers to all use cases of semantic interoperability: application-to-application, application-to-person, person-to-person, and so forth.

As I survey the vast ocean of Semantic Web-ish activity going on out there, it’s clear to me that only a subset of it is being addressed by the W3C’s Semantic Web activity. Viewed globally, the Semantic Web community divides into two loosely scoped “camps,” with each having its own focus:

• SOA Semantic Web (i.e., W3C with RDF, OWL, SPARQL, GRDDL, etc., addressing app-to-app and app-to-person semantic interoperability in an SOA/Web 1.0 environment, where the vast majority of the activity addresses the need to surface and make transparent the originator-intended semantics of structured info expressed in XML and other standardized markup syntax):
• Explicit semantic modeling (i.e, knowledge representation languages that provide app/data developers with formal grammars for expressing the entity-relationship graphs and hierarchies/taxonomies within which structured content is generated, transmitted, and consumed)
• Controlled semantic vocabularies (i.e., source-domain-asserted ontologies, definitions, tags, metadata, schemas, glossaries, hierarchies, etc. under governance/stewardship of clearly defined domain authorities)
• Deterministic semantic mediation (i.e., certain semantic correspondence among autonomous semantic domains’ ontologies, via well-defined mapping/transformations among different domains’ vocabularies, per agreed-upon standards, conventions, federation agreements, etc.)
  

• Social Semantic Web (i.e., all the user-centric application-to-person and person-to-person “folksonomy” and social networking/bookmarking stuff in the Web 2.0 world, where most of the activity concerns the need to aggregate, classify/cluster, apply third-party tag-based contextualization to, and mine the latent meanings of various structured, unstructured, and media content objects originated by users themselves and/or third-parties, such as media websites, other users, etc.):
• Implicit semantic modeling (i.e., natural human languages that provide normal human beings with informal/colloquial grammars for expressing themselves within unstructured/semi-structured content objects, from which, through text mining/analytics, those humans’ implicit ontology of entities, classes, relationships, sentiments, etc are extracted, surfaced, etc.; hence semantic “mining” takes precedence over semantic “modeling”)
• Uncontrolled semantic vocabularies (i.e., target-user-asserted keywords, tags, comments, scores, votes, evaluations, etc. that they apply to any self-originated or third-party-originated content, site, resource, entity, etc., without need for prior agreement or relationship with third-party content originator, and without need for the meaning-asserting target-user to implement any systematic governance/stewardship over the idiosyncratic “vocabularies” or “ontologies” they use to express the meaning, to them, of everything they encounter online; hence, user-idiosyncratic semantic “waywardship” takes precedence over authority-governed semantic “stewardship”)
• Probabilistic semantic mediation (i.e., uncertain prima-facie semantic correspondence among diverse source-domain-asserted ontologies and user-asserted implicit “ontologies,” and among different user-asserted “ontologies” keyed on any given content/resource, hence the need for fuzzy matching, relevance ranking, inference engines, data/text mining, clustering/classification, and other automated techniques to establish greater confidence in semantic correspondence; and also the occasional need for human content analysis/judgment to deal with all the gray areas where it’s not clear if two or more users or documents or blogs or social networking sites are referring to the same or different things)

There’s a lot going on in the text mining/analytics space right now. That’s going to be a pivotal technology behind the Social Semantic Web. I don’t see much uptake of RDF/OWL—the heart of the SOA Semantic Web—in the social networking world. Not yet. Unless others see something I’m not seeing.

Why doesn't W3C take up defining standards for the Social Semantic Web? And what would those standards be?

More to come.

Jim

imho Ocean Semantic……

All:

Ubiquitous semantic interoperability is like world peace. It’s a goal so grandiose, nebulous, and contrary to the fractious realities of distributed networking that it hardly seems worth waiting for. In most circumstances, we can usually assume that heterogeneous applications will employ different schemas to define semantically equivalent entities—such as customer data records—and that some sweat equity will be needed to define cross-domain data mappings for full interoperability.

Nevertheless, many smart people feel that automated, end-to-end, standards-based semantic interoperability is more than a pipe dream. Most notably, the World Wide Web Consortium’s long-running Semantic Web initiative just keeps chugging away, developing specifications that have fleshed out Tim Berners-Lee’s vision to a modest degree and gained a smidgen of real-world adoption. If nothing else, the W3C can point to the Resource Description Framework (RDF)—the first and most fundamental output from this W3C activity—as a solid accomplishment. Created just before the turn of the millennium, RDF—plus the closely related Web Ontology Language (OWL)--provides an XML/URI-based grammar for representing diverse entities and their multifaceted relationships.

However, RDF, OWL, and kindred W3C specifications have not exactly taken the service-oriented architecture (SOA) world by storm. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to name a single pure-play vendor of Semantic Web technology that’s well-known to the average enterprise IT professional. And rare is the enterprise IT organization that’s looking for people with backgrounds in or familiarity with Semantic Web technologies. This remains an immature, highly specialized niche in which academic research projects far outnumber commercial products, and in which most products are point solutions rather than integrated features of enterprise databases, development tools, and application platforms.

Part of the problem is that, from the very start, the W3C’s Semantic Web initiative has been more utopian than practical in focus. If you tune into Berners-Lee’s vision, it seems to refer to some sort of supermagical metadata, description, and policy layer that will deliver universal interoperability by making every networked resource automatically and perpetually self-describing on every conceivable level. Alternately, it seems to call for some sort of XML-based tagging vocabulary that everybody will apply to every scrap of online content, thereby facilitating more powerful metadata discovery, indexing, and search. The success of the whole Semantic Web project seems to be predicated on the belief that these nouveau standards will be adopted universally in the very near future.

Needless to say, this future’s been slow to arrive. Commercial progress on the Semantic Web front has been glacial, at best, with no clear tipping point in sight. It’s been eight years since RDF was ratified by W3C, and more than three years since OWL spread its wings, but neither has achieved breakaway vendor or user adoption. To be fair, there has been a steady rise in the number of semantics projects and start-ups, as evidenced by growing participation in the annual Semantic Technology Conference, which was recently held in San Jose CA. And there has been a recent resurgence in industry attention to semantics issues, such as the recent announcement of a “Semantic SOA Consortium.” Some have even attempted, lamely, to rebrand Semantic Web as “Web 3.0,” so as to create the impression that this is a new initiative and not an old effort straining to stay relevant.

But the SOA market sectors that one would expect to embrace the Semantic Web have largely kept their distance. In theory, vendors of search, enterprise content management, enterprise information integration, enterprise service bus, business intelligence, relational database, master data management, and data quality would all benefit from the ability to automatically harmonize divergent ontologies across heterogeneous environments. But only a handful of vendors from these niches—most notably, Oracle, Software AG, and Composite Software—has taken a visible role in the Semantic Web community, and even these vendors seem to be taking a wait-and-see attitude to it all. One big reason for reluctance is that there are already many established tools and approaches for semantic interoperability in the SOA world, and the new W3C-developed approaches have not yet demonstrated any significant advantages in development productivity, flexibility, or cost.

One of the leading indicators of any technology’s commercial adoption is the extent to which Microsoft is on board. By that criterion, the Semantic Web has a long way to go, and may not get to first base until early in the next decade, at the very least. The vendor’s ambitious roadmap for its SQL Server product includes no mention of the Semantic Web, ontologies, RDF, or anything to that effect. So far, the only mention of semantic interoperability in Microsoft’s strategy is in a new development project codenamed “Astoria.” Project “Astoria,”, which was announced in May at Microsoft’s MIX conference, will support greater SOA-based semantic interoperability on the ADO.Net framework through a new Entity Data Model schema that implements RDF, XML, and URIs. However, Microsoft has not committed to integrating “Astoria” with SQL Server, nor is it planning to implement any of the W3C’s other Semantic Web specifications. Essentially, “Astoria” is Microsoft’s trial balloon to see if a Semantic Web-lite architecture lights any fires in the development community.

Clearly, there is persistent attention to semantic interoperability issues throughout the distributed computing industry, and Microsoft is certainly not the only SOA vendor that is at least pondering these issues on a high architectural plane. The W3C’s Semantic Web initiative may indeed be the seedbed of a new semantics-enabling SOA, though it may take a lot longer for this dream to be fully realized. It may take another generation or so before we see anything resembling a universal semantic backplane that spans all SOA platforms.

After all, the utopian hypertext visions articulated by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s and Ted Nelson in the 1960s had to wait till the 1990s, until Tim Berners-Lee nudged something called the World Wide Web into existence.

More to come.

Jim