Still missing, however, is widespread support of W3C standards and common vocabularies that will facilitate semantic queries across different Web and business domains. Right now, the majority of semantic Web schemas are developed by, and proprietary to, individual companies both on and off the Web, and different groups within a business enterprise. Such frameworks often contain business- and function-specific terms, jargon and acronyms that don't translate well to other knowledge domains. As a result, to do cross-domain querying, semantic applications and services must interface with each information source's ontology individually, according to industry sources.

Take the case of Eni. The global energy company's technical and subject matter experts have spent 12 years developing and fine-tuning a semantic-based BI platform based on Expert System's Cogito, according to Daniele Montanari, Eni's practice leader for semantic technologies. The platform supports oil-, gas- and power-related trading, production and logistics processes, Montanari adds.

Cogito allows Eni's end users to go to a preselected and often presubscribed information source on the Web, locate key information on a particular topic and generate a "corpus" that can then be downloaded, automatically updated and semantically queried, Montanari says.

Semantic schemas tend to be specific to a particular business area, Montanari says. For example, the company's refining division has developed semantic frameworks and classifications to quickly locate information within a vast corpus of articles. Many of those articles were written by Eni's R&D group, while others come from Web sources to which the group subscribes, he notes.