Semantic Web

I recently read an article about the semantic web. Like search, the semantic web is a powerful way for a person or organization to extract information from data. The idea (over-simplified, if not half wrong) is that a group of experts in a domain can define a way of representing data for that domain. Applications or people that generate data for that domain do so in the official format which allows computers to use that data to make inferences, i.e. "learn".

The semantic web could potentially provide even more power than search for corporations trying to optimize their business. It's a little fuzzy like search in that there is not necessarily a clear path to the one true answer. On the one hand, how do you sell someone on a dashboard that may or may not return a useful answer? But on the other hand, why shouldn't corporate dashboard users have access to tools that are powerful enough to answer questions the user hasn't even thought of yet.

At a minimum I think ideas from the semantic web can be leveraged for business intelligence analytics and could make it much easier in the future to write applications that integrate with multiple different data sources.