I will give you my perspective after about 3 years of deploying semantic web technologies, but remember as in most things, your mileage may vary,
The starting challenge we face is constraining vocabularies in transactional systems so that data can be integrated across systems. What we desire is to have the client systems issue a query and have the server return a list which typically is used for drop down menus in the transactionmal systems. At first blush this need can be addressed with simple vocabulary lists in perhaps a relational data base system. for small number of systems which have a similar view of the vocabulary and where the vocabulary has consistent behaviors, this would be a reasonable decision. However, if we have: - large number of systems - many of which are not controlled by a single organizaton - for complex vocabularies where the terms may have very different additional qualifiers or associated terms - where the client systems have need to access the vocabularies in many different ways we have then found the following challenges with relational database systems: o since the terms can have very different associated data, the relational database structure becomes sparse and inefficient: the triple store model is a much more effective data store approach o when the vocabulary is viewed differently by different systems, simple structured lists become challenging to represent the differing ways of understanding the vocabulary: a simplified model of the language space (an ontology) allows one to access the data in a much more flexible manner, particularly if the data structures are sparse. A semantic web approach is not without its challenges, perhaps the biggest being the shortage of staff knowledgeable in these aproaches who understand that this is a language model for use by computers, not by people. But we do have this in production over an increasing number of systems with reasonable success. On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 7:22 AM, kumar rohit <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, what are the benefits of semantic web technologies? I have used > semantic web technologies from one year but, in theory I am not sure the > real advantages of semantic web. > When we develop a system using traditional RDBMS and Java and same system > we develop using Java/Jena Protege SPARQL etc, so what is the advantage of > the latter application? > -- 73, AB1PH Don Rolph
