SAP: From Sybase to Semantics

September 11, 2010

SAP is certainly trying to convince me that the little chip off the Big Blue block has what it takes in today’s economic thunderstorm. I am interested in SAP because the company’s approach represents a model that seems to be increasingly difficult to use to make me happy. The azurini love SAP, but a goose like me? Not so much.

Now with increasing research role in the semantic web space, we find SAP surprisingly becoming a ‘gorilla’ in this realm. The Semantic Web.com article “Semantic Web Meets BI In New Project Whose Partners Include SAP, Sheffield Hallam University, Ontotext” informs about SAPs yet another venture as a R&D and managing partner of a collaborative project. It is the Combining and Uniting Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies (CUBIST) semantic web-BI space project, initiated “to create new visual tools to help businesses make sense of tons of data.” For more about Ontotext, visit the firm’s Web site at www.ontotext.com.

As per the article, “The goal of the project is ambitious: it will develop the first framework for enriching Business Intelligence with Semantic Web technologies,” which it intends to achieve by “developing a semantic incorporated business platform dealing with large amount of data and offering interactive visualization.” SAP, which provides the bulk of the project management, has earlier been a part of the Monnet Project involved in cross-lingual business intelligence using semantic technology.

Will this semantic push be the magic for SAP and Sybase? The goose is skeptical. And whatever happened to TREX and the SAP stake in Endeca. Are not these systems equipped with some semantic sweetness?

Harleena Singh, September 11, 2010

Freebie

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Enterprise, News, Semantic, Technology, Text processing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.