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357 lines
13 KiB
357 lines
13 KiB
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
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<head>
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<meta name="generator"
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content="HTML Tidy for Mac OS X (vers 1st September 2004), see www.w3.org" />
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<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
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content="text/html; charset=us-ascii" />
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<title>Semantic Web Advanced Development for Europe
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(SWAD-Europe)</title>
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<link href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/style/swad-europe-showcase.css"
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rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
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<style type="text/css">/*
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<![CDATA[*/
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body {
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font-family: verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
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}
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#leftcontent {
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#rightcontent {
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position: absolute;
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#mainMenu {
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padding: 0px;
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.menu li {
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a.actuator {
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.menu li a {
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span.key {
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/*]]>
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*/</style>
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</head>
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<body>
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<div id="leftcontent" valign="top">
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<div align="center" valign="top">
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe">
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<img alt="SWAD-Europe"
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src="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/images/swade100.gif"
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height="75" border="0" /></a>
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<a href="http://www.cordis.lu/ist/">
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<img src="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/images/istlogo-thumb.gif"
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alt="EU IST logo" height="75" border="0" /></a>
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</div>
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<div id="mainMenu">
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<ul id="menuList">
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<li class="nonexpandingmenubar">
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/" id="introMenu"
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name="introMenu">Introduction</a>
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</li>
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<li class="menubar">
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<a id="demosMenuActuator" class="actuator" accesskey="d"
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name="demosMenuActuator">Demonstrators</a>
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<ul id="demosMenu" class="menu">
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/sem-blog.html">
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Semantic Blogging</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/sem-portal.html">
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Semantic Portals</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/sem-thes.html">
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Thesaurus Browser</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/sem-large.html">
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Scale Demonstrator</a>
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</li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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<li class="menubar">
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<a id="themesMenuActuator" class="actuator" accesskey="t"
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name="themesMenuActuator">Themes</a>
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<ul id="themesMenu" class="menu">
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/gs.html">Getting
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Started</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/tools/">Tools</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/digital-libraries.html">
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Digital Libraries</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/business-integration.html">
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Business Integration</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/images.html">
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Image Description</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/community/">
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Community Building</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/history.html">
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Project History</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/future.html">
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Future Directions</a>
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</li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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<li class="menubar">
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<a id="guideMenuActuator" class="actuator" accesskey="g"
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name="guideMenuActuator">Guidelines</a>
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<ul id="guideMenu" class="menu">
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<!--<li><a href="blank.html">Aerospace</a> stilo*</li>-->
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/lifesci.html">
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Life Science</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/guide-for-librarian.html">
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Librarian</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/coder.html">
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Coder</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/business-guidelines.html">
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Business Integration</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/heritage.html">
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Heritage</a>
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</li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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<li class="menubar">
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<a id="resourcesMenuActuator" class="actuator" accesskey="r"
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name="resourcesMenuActuator">Resources</a>
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<ul id="resourcesMenu" class="menu">
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/intro.html">
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Reports</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/presentations.html">
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Presentations</a>
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</li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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<li class="nonexpandingmenubar">
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/contact.html"
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id="contactMenu" name="contactMenu">Contact</a>
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</li>
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</ul>
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</div>
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</div>
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<!-- content goes here -->
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<div id="rightcontent">
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<h1 class="title">Guidelines - Business Integration</h1>
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<h2 class="title">What do we mean by business integration?</h2>
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<p class="title">Many businesses depend on a very complex and
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heterogeneous mix of information. Solving a customer problem,
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managing a workflow, establishing a supply chain or designing a new
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product requires integrating many different sources of information
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from many different enterprise systems.</p>
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<p class="title">This is a huge and diverse problem area which has
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spawned many important industry product streams. For example
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integrating the information on supply chain and demand information
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is at the heart of products such as <i>Enterprise Resource
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Planners</i> like SAP; integrating metadata to manage document and
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records content is the core of <i>Enterprise Document
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Management</i><i>.</i> Within these huge areas the specific sub
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problems of data integration (providing gateways onto different
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data stores and data models) and application integration
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(infrastructure for propagating changes in the data between
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applications to invoke the business logic or services of one
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application from another) are distinct subthemes and are themselves
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multi-billion dollar industries.</p>
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<p class="title">The typical approach taken by existing products is
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often a centralizing one. A single application suite is used to
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provide the desired integrated service and includes common
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information models. The connecting applications are either replaced
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by ones which conform to the centralized standard or they are
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placed behind wrappers or gateways which allows them to
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interoperate with the central solution.</p>
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<p class="title">The semantic web offers relevant standards and
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approaches that can help with these problems. It offers open
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standards that can enable vendor neutral solutions, it offers a
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useful flexibility (structured and semi-structured, formal and
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informal, open extensibility) and it helps to support decentralized
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solutions where that is appropriate.</p>
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<p class="title">It is not a panacea. Many of the underlying
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problems are fundamentally hard in terms of scale, incompatibility
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of information models or lack of known semantics for existing data
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and the semantic web is not a magic wand that side steps such
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issues.</p>
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<p class="title">Rather than expect semantic web tools to displace
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existing data and application integration products we would expect
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to see vendors of such products start to support semantic web
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interoperability and begin to reuse some of the approaches.
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Brandsoft's entry in the Enterprise Document Management space is,
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perhaps, an early example of this.</p>
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<p class="title">We would also expect new products to arise
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catering to specific business integration problems which are
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particularly good matches to the semantic web's strengths and
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weaknesses. For example, some industries such as aerospace and
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pharmaceuticals depend on a very expensive and knowledge intensive
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design process that requires much deeper and more specialist
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information integration than offered by generic enterprise document
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management suites. It is not surprising to find that bioscience is
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one of the most active areas of semantic web application.</p>
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<h2 class="title">How does the semantic web help?</h2>
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<p class="title">The semantic web data representation, RDF, offers
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a common open standard format capable of representing both
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structured data (such as that found in relational databases) and
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semi-structured data (annotations, links and sparse properties that
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are not uniformly applied across all instances of the same type).
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Thus RDF can be used as a common interchange format.</p>
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<p class="title">Whilst other formats can be used as well, RDF does
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have some advantages. It is a generic open standard whereas many
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alternatives are either proprietary or specific to an industry
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segment. It standardizes the data model (together with a
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serialization syntax) whereas alternatives such as direct use of
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XML focus on the document syntax. By breaking down information into
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small independent units (triples) and using global identifiers for
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all objects/properties/types (URIs) it becomes possible to
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integrate information from several sources by simply concatenating
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the sets of the triples and following the new relations. The data
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model is sufficiently simple and makes sufficiently few assumptions
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that it be used to express both structured and semi-structured data
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making integration across heterogeneous sources more
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straightforward. By using specifically URIs, rather than any
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arbitrary naming scheme, to identify objects then RDF works well
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with other worldwide web standards including XML - this makes it
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possible to use it as a glue to connect specialist data objects
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expressed in formats such as MathML, SVG and so forth.</p>
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<p class="title">A shared data model is not useful for information
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integration unless the sources being integrated share, or can be
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made to share, common vocabulary elements representing some shared
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conceptual model. The second layer of the semantic web stack (RDFS,
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OWL) enables the publication of such vocabularies. Again the use of
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URIs to identify the concepts in this vocabularies makes it
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possible to combine vocabularies from multiple sources - in
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particular it is trivial to mix and match properties from multiple
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vocabularies and to create new concepts that specialize or
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generalize existing published concepts. This enables applications
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to make a tradeoff between the degree of centralization required.
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Rather than mandating use of a single central vocabulary it
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encourages publication and reuse of vocabulary elements whilst make
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it possible to extend or augment external vocabularies when needed.
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The representations also offer some support for mapping between
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vocabulary elements - though the discovery of such mappings remains
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as challenging a problem as ever.</p>
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<p class="title">An important strength of the semantic web stack is
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the freedom it gives to chose the right degree of formal modeling
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to apply to a given situation. A formal conceptual model may be
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expressed using the full power of OWL/DL whereas a simple
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hierarchical organization scheme can be expressed either in RDFS or
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directly in RDF using a thesaurus vocabulary such as SKOS.</p>
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<p class="title">Taken together these features mean that the
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semantic web technology stack enables applications and information
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sources to publish their data, vocabulary and conceptual models in
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an open standards way that aids integration. This does not replace
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the need for centralization and common data models in many business
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activities. However, it does mean that where information is
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naturally distributed and inhomogeneous (because it is used for
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other specialized purposes) then it may still be possible achieve a
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useful level of integration using these open standards in a way
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that scales linearly with the number of sources rather than require
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N*N specialist cross-translators.</p>
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<h2 class="title">SWAD-Europe resources relevant to this
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problem</h2>
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<h3 class="title">Information integration demonstrators</h3>
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<p class="title">The <a href="sem-blog.html">semantic blogging</a>
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and <a href="sem-portal.html">semantic portals</a> together
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illustrate some of the features of an information integration
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infrastructure. The semantic portal illustrates a process of
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aggregating RDF data from multiple sources and integrating it to
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provide a common browsable view. The semantic blogging demonstrator
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illustrates how small informal information items can be published
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by individuals in a lightweight way. The two demonstrators can be
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(and have been) combined for applications such as knowledge
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management where individuals can publish news items and small
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information snippets that integrate with structured data sources
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accessed via a common portal.</p>
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</div>
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</body>
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</html>
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