York Sure of SAP at ISWC
Second talk at an industry panel: York Sure left academia, went to SAP to try to use semantic web in industry. He’s discussing that “business process” stuff that seems to excite business types but that I often can’t understand. But he’s made it pretty clear. Outsourcing means part of your process isn’t owned by you, which also means part of your information isn’t owned by you. How can you structure your information systems so that outsourcing works—ie, deal with integration of information coming from many different outsourcing suppliers. In particular he talks about marshalling a bunch of different service providers to accomplish a task for you; to support that you need “service discovery” which makes it possible to find the services you need to have provided for your task. This in turn requires a way of describing the services that you will understand, which is where the semantic web comes in.