Training and deployment issues remain important because, while semantics-based integration software can go a long way toward easing data integration woes, they’re not quite perfect. That’s because the current crop of semantics-based integration tools still require some degree of manual input or configuration. Humans also have to double-check the software’s handiwork to see that it hasn’t made any faulty assumptions. Fully automatic semantics-based integration would require no external fiddling. "It is definitely the right idea, but it’s years ahead of any implementation on a broad scale," says AMR Research’s Austvold. Michael Lees, founder and COO of Manchester, England-based Network Inference, is even more succinct: "Proper semantic integration is still in its infancy."

Weaving the Semantic Web

Concurrent with the creation of semantics-based integration tools is an even more ambitious initiative: the development of a Semantic Web. Advocates, including the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), are planning to string together a Web that not only links documents to each other but that also recognizes the meaning of data contained within those documents. While semantics-based integration tools are designed to work with various types of structured data, the Semantic Web aims to unify the unstructured information scattered across the wild Web. The ultimate goal is to transform the Web from a display-oriented publishing medium into an environment where information can be interpreted, exchanged and processed.

Developing the necessary tools, such as highly descriptive Web content meta-tags and techniques that will allow different programs to relate and share meta-data from various websites, is shaping up to be an immense task. Yet the potential payoff?a Web that acts like a single giant database?would be worth all the effort. "The buzz is starting to feel like the buzz at the start of the original World Wide Web," says Lees. "There are still a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of unproven ideas, but at the core is a technology that will change the Web."

By making data understandable to all systems, a Semantic Web would dovetail nicely with Web services, the budding technology that allows incompatible applications to talk to each other. Adding Semantic Web support to Web services would open the door to new worlds of potentially meaningful data. "The whole idea of the Semantic Web is to make all information machine-processable," says Ramana Venkata, CTO and cofounder of Stratify, a Mountain View, Calif., company that produces software for organizing and managing unstructured data. "Think of Web services as a sort of down payment today for the Semantic Web of five years hence."