Semantic Enterprise Technologies

Nowadays enterprises request information technologies that leverage structured and unstructured information for providing a single integrated view of business problems in order to foster better business process management and decision making. The growing interest in semantic technologies is due to the limitation of existing enterprise information technologies to answer these new challenging needs. Semantic Web Technologies (SWT), the current open standard approaches to semantic technologies based on semantic web languages, provide some interesting answers to novel enterprise needs by allowing to use domain knowledge within applications. However, SWT aren’t well suited for enterprise domain because of some drawbacks and a lack of compatibility with enterprise-class applications. This paper presents the new Semantic Enterprise Technologies (SET) paradigm founded on the idea of Semantic Models that are executable, flexible and agile representation of domain knowledge. Semantic Models are expressed by means of the Codex Language obtained combining Disjunctive Logic Programming (Datalog plus disjunction) and Attribute Grammars both extended by object-oriented and twodimensional capabilities. Semantic Models enable to exploit domain knowledge for managing both structured and unstructured information. Since the Codex Language derives from the database field, it allows SET to provide advanced semantic capabilities well suited for enterprises. Differences and interoperability issue between SET and SWT are briefly discussed in the paper that shows, also the SET Reference Architecture (SETA), an application example and the business value of SET.