Oracle, Metatomix Team On Semantic Web Goodies

With the Web 2.0 hype wave cresting, Oracle is ramping up its push into the "Semantic Web."

Toward that end it is teaming with Metatomix which is building frameworks to ease the collection and reuse of data from disparate sources especially in the financial services, "integrated justice," manufacturing and life sciences sectors.

Waltham, Mass.-based Metatomix is now formally supporting the Oracle 10g database and its RDF capabilities, the two companies said at the Semantic Technologies Conference in San Jose.

RDF, or Resource Description Framework itself is a way to describe metadata—or the data about the data—in a way that makes the data more easily found and utilized.

"Companies have had lots of data sources and formatsin many file systems and databases but if they want to extract information from all of those or use them together, they had to handcraft integration between all the sources and put them together," said Bob Shimp, vice president of Oracle's Global Technology Business Unit. "You also had to know what you're looking for and had to understand the database schemas."

The promise of this new generation of semantic technologies is to enable the identification and reuse of that informationto happen much more flexibly and effectively.

Part of the "Semantic Web" ideal is that many tasks—searches, etc.—could happen between processes without a person necessarily having to kick them off. For that to happen the data has to be better self-described and that is where RDF comes in.

System integrators and VARs could use Metatomix frameworks to bring customers in various verticals into this brave new world, said Jeff Dickerson, CEO of Metatomix.

Integrators and VARs with domain expertise in other verticals could also use Metatomix as the foundation for their vertical work, he said.

"Our belief is we won't create specific detailed applications in all verticalsWe will provide what we believe is best from semantic standpoint so they can go out grab disparate data from many sources and build their own," he told CRN on Tuesday.

Metatomix claims big customers including the states of Ohio, Vermont and Florida as well as Boston-based State Street Bank. Most of its clients also use Oracle databases, Dickerson said.

"Our track is not unusual, we have some broad-reaching patents in the semantic market place and extended our IP, we took it to early adopters and built solutions for the state of Florida and learned along the way from our experiences, and started delivering more packaged solutions," Dickerson said.