My 2 cents:

I've been working with semantic web technologies for the past 3 years.
>From this experience, I can see 3 good candidates to justify using semantic
web technologies, and each one is based on a different aspect of the
semantic web:

1) Graphs - Semantic Web is essentially about graphs. The RDF framework and
triplestores are designed to model and store graphs, and they (mostly RDF)
are the fundamental technologies of the semantic web.
Graphs are better and way more flexible to describe complex relationships
among things. You can see the benefits even when not working with semantic
web, like when using properties graphs. Here it's mostly related to the
NoSQL nature of Semantic Web.

2) Interoperability - Semantic Web is also about sharing vocabularies, and
this is a pretty nice 'feature' when it comes to system/softwares
interoperability. Suppose consuming a service API. When your system
receives data, it must know how to handle it. If the data structure is
known, or if your system knows the vocabulary, it's much easier. A good
example are the federated sparql queries. Depending on the vocabularies
adopted, a single query can find data in different repositories.

3) Reasoning - Semantic Web is a small part of the IA world. Like with the
other aspects, maybe there's still challenges, but tools like Jena already
allows the use of reasoners. Maybe this is the most powerful and yet the
most difficult candidate to assimilate. One could apply reasoning over it's
own data or to combined / integrated data to discover new data, and the
possibilities here are very wide.

The downside, however, is the crucial aspect that semantic web (and the use
of semantic web technologies) is much harder than the "traditional way",
but, once I've took a summer course with researcher in the field of formal
ontology who said something like: "Ontologies are difficult because the
world is difficult". And this sums up the fact that, although it brings
benefits, semantic web was conceived to solve very complex scenarios, like
the one described by Tim Berners-Lee
<https://www-sop.inria.fr/acacia/cours/essi2006/Scientific%20American_%20Feature%20Article_%20The%20Semantic%20Web_%20May%202001.pdf>.
In a business world, if you don't imediatly see such complex scenario, it's
really hard to adopt semantic web (that's what I've been seeing around).

Most of this can be debated, but it's most about my opinions over my own
(maybe short) experience.


Rodrigo C. Antonialli
======================================
Rio Claro - SP - Brasil
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rcantonialli
Contato:  [email protected]
              Skype: rc_antonialli

On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 3:02 PM, David Jordan <[email protected]>
wrote:

> I agree that have some discussion about this is very useful. Many of us
> have tried to evangelize semantic web technologies in our organizations and
> have struggled and failed because we cannot provide sufficient
> justification for using the technology. Hearing the specific value provided
> that can convince the skeptics is extremely valuable, much more valuable
> than simple support questions about a particular API interface.
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 10:50 AM, Andy Seaborne <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > kumar,
> >
> > Have you done some investigation by searching on the web?
> >
> > You will find many articles, blogs and papers from a wide range of
> > perspectives.
> >
> >     Andy
> >
> >
> > On 10/02/17 12:22, kumar rohit 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?
> >>
> >>
>

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