The past 10 years of Web evolution have established electronic markets and led to the rise and fall of the "new economy". The next 10 years may be characterized by the transformation of the Web from a document publication medium intended for human consumption into a medium for intelligent knowledge interchange. This development is pushed under the umbrella of the W3C Semantic Web initiative by a joined effort of scientific (MIT, Stanford, ILRT etc.) and business institutions (HP, IBM, Nokia etc.). The basic idea of the Semantic Web is to publish - in addition to classic HTML pages - data directly on the web. The final vision is to use the web as a global distributed database, which could be queried like a local database today. The W3C Semantic Web architecture stack is defining the reference architecture for the ongoing standardization process. The standardization of the basis layers of the architecture is already at a very advanced state. The standardization of the higher layers (security, logic, proof, trust) is just starting.
While there are still a lot of technological issues to be solved, the Semantic Web is in a phase in which consensus about its potentials exists. However, it is not clear what economic effects these new technologies and their applications will have on markets and enterprise:
wwj GmbH, Jens Hagendorff (Executive Director), Andreas Werner (Marketing Manager)
The InterVal Knowledge Nets project approaches the impact of
semantic technologies
from the business and the technical viewpoint, in order to make
predictions
about the influence of the new technologies on markets, enterprises and
individuals.
The project studies the above questions by using scenario analysis as a
basis
to explore the effects of the deployment of Semantic Web technologies.
We
derive scenarios from two subscenarios. One is a technological scenario
that
assumes the availability of semantic technologies in a perspective of
several
years. The second is a deployment scenario that assumes that semantic
application
specific knowledge is available in machine readable form usable for
applications.
From the combination of these two projections we derive e-business
scenarios,
for analysis and experimentation with. This approach allows us already
in
the current early stage of development to make statements about the
implications
of the new technology on the participants of the scenario. Who will
benefit?
Who will loose market positions or will have to change his business
model?
This analysis of the participant's roles combined with the analysis of
technical
restrictions allows us to project if a scenario has chances to be
realized.
| Work Package 1 | Szenario Global Sourcing | 07/03-03/06 |
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| Work Package 2 | Szenario IT Services for the Automotive Sector | 10/04-06/07 |
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| Work Package 3 | Software Components and Scenario Evaluation Kit | 10/03-06/07 |
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| Work Package 4 | Transfer | 07/04-12/07 |
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Knowledge Nets is part of the InterVal -
Berlin Research Centre for the Internet Economy and is funded by
the German Ministry of Research BMBF.
