Enterprise Applications of Semantic Web: The Sweet Spot of Risk and Compliance

Semantic Web is in the transition from vision and research to reality. In this early state, it is important to study the technical capabilities in the context of real-world applications, and how applications built using the Semantic Web technology meet the real market needs. Beyond push from research, it is the market pull and the ability of the technology to meet real business needs that is a key to ultimate success of any technology. In this paper, we discuss the market of Risk and Compliance which presents unique market opportunity combined with challenging technical requirements. We discuss how the Semantic Web technology with an ontology driven approach is especially well suited to support the demanding requirements of the applications in this market. We also discuss the capabilities of a commercial semantic technology that has origins in academic research, as it is utilized in a significant Risk and Compliance application deployed at large financial institutions. Core capabilities of this technology include the ability to develop and maintain focused but large populated ontologies, automatic semantic metadata extraction supported by disambiguation techniques, ability to process heterogeneous information and provide semantic integration combined with link identification and analysis through rule specification and execution, as well as organization and domain specific scoring and ranking. These semantic capabilities are coupled with enterprise software capabilities which are necessary for success of an emerging technology for meeting the needs of demanding enterprise customers