Enterprises, Struggling to Manage Your Data? Try The Semantic Web

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Enterprises, Struggling to Manage Your Data? Try The Semantic Web

A new PricewaterhouseCoopers Technology report explains how the Semantic Web and Linked Data can help enterprises manage their large scale data better. The PwC Center for Technology and Innovation team spent several months researching and analyzing the problem of data silos in enterprises - and what solutions are being developed to help with that problem. The answer, according to PwC, is Semantic Web techniques. PwC believes that the Semantic Web offers a practical way to address the problem of large-scale data integration.

We downloaded the 58-page report and summarize some of the findings for you in this post.

PwC wrote in the report that the underlying technology of the Semantic Web applies not just to online data, but to "internal information and non-Web-based external information" - including a company's data warehouse. Currently enterprises struggle with hefty relational databases, but PwC says that the Semantic Web could both lower costs and provide more data. What's more companies can contribute their "non-sensitive" ontologies to the Linked data cloud:

"With the Semantic Web, you don't have to reinvent the wheel with your own ontology, because others, such as musicontology.com and DBpedia, have already created ontologies and made them available on the Web. As long as they're public and useful, you can use those. Where your context differs from theirs, you make yours specific, but where there's commonality, you use what they have created and leave it in place. Ideally, you make public the non-sensitive elements of your business-specific ontology that are consistent with your business model, so others can make use of them."

We recommend you read the report for a full understanding of ontologies, but basically they are the means to connect data and metadata together. PwC goes on to explain ...

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_enterprise_pwc.php

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_enterprise_pwc.php