Semantic Content Management for Enterprises and the Web

The Semantic Web [Be99], some researchers hope, might have an even bigger impact than what the WWW has achieved. This requires that data or content, whether Web pages or anything exchanged and displayed on Intranets and the Internet, be "semantically" annotated so that the meaning of data is expressed such that programs can understand it [Be99, FM01, BHO01]. The primary benefit of the vision of the Semantic Web is that it juxtaposes semantics and the Web. Semantics, with meaning and use of data, brings information closer to human thinking and decision-making. Together, these force us to simultaneously deal with the complexity of modeling, reasoning and perceptions to support semantics, with the huge scale and heterogeneity of all imaginable kind needed to deal with the Web. Researchers in diverse areas have studied semantics for a long time. We have seen a steady progress from syntax, to representation and structure, and to semantics [S98], in the ways we approach and solve the challenges of finding, integrating and using information of diverse types and from diverse sources. Businesses have noticed the importance of semantics, too, in several ways. This has involved, among other things, development of taxonomies or ontologies and metadata standards of interest to an enterprise or industry, organization of content according to such taxonomies, annotation of content with metadata, especially contextually relevant or domain specific metadata, analysis of content for patterns or its mining to identify relationships between data from different sources, etc. Applications have ranged from improving search and personalization, organizing content for enterprise and industry portals, and improving syndication of content. The key to a semantic approach and technology is agreement among humans, embodied in terms of ontological commitments and knowledge sharing through shared used of ontologies. Achieving such agreements amidst a very broad, pan-Web scale is difficult and expensive, which is why there are few very large ontologies. Developing successful business models for activities that span the entire Web is also difficult. During the recent upheaval in the Internet and digital content market, companies have increasingly shifted their focus to serving medium and large enterprises, rather than consumers and world wide audiences, as noticed by the decimation of B2C and large declines of B2B businesses, but relatively stronger showing of enterprise software players. Thus, for both technological and business reasons, we find that businesses developing solutions based on semantic or Semantic Web technologies focus on enterprise software markets. These technologies are also extending or finding specific applications in what is also considered to be Content Management and Knowledge Management markets, both of which are currently a few hundreds of millions of dollars large. Over 25 companies claim to offer semantic technologies or products and services enabling the Semantic Web (see: http://business. semanticweb. org). In this article, we describe the Semantic Content Organization and Retrieval Engine (SCORE) technology in depth, and use it as the basis of describing some of the key components in building Semantic Web solutions. This is also an example of technology, which originated from academia, in this case the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Lab (LSDIS) at the University of Georgia, and was licensed to start a company, Taalee, Inc. Taalee was later acquired by Voquette, Inc. [V], which now provides commercial products and services based on the SCORE technology. The focus of this paper is on the patented SCORE technology [SAB01] and what it has to offer now and in the near term. Broad-based commercial adoption and Sheth et. al. Semantic Content Management for Enterprises and the Web.