One of the most relevant results of  Technovision report is the identification of blockers to move semantics from laboratory to market.  We all know that the introduction of new technology trends is usually a difficult task.

Although there is a big consensus about the acceptable maturity level of STE, it is not easy to measure beforehand the resistance and difficulties to implement solutions as the STE. Some barriers such as legacy systems, inertia, and staff habits ought to be overcome in order to achieve successful implementations.

For this reason, Value-it project is aiming at analysing the ST from the market point of view. In the scope of this project an important effort to detect ST blockers has been undertaken, because despite the great deal of academic research on ontologies for the enterprise, their actual use in real-life integration and planning projects is scarce. The methodology used consists of several consortium meetings, online & offline partner discussions, as well as data and information gathered through desk research and a set of 11 highly selective interviews with experts and suppliers.
According to this study, the blockers to implement solutions based on ST as those proposed in this article can be divided into two groups:
Technology blockers:
In general, all interviewees reported on three different issues:

• Data Structuring: The definition of a common and standard data interchange language, or set of languages is indeed in an advanced stage. Nevertheless they are not satisfactory at all in terms of usability for a broad and effective use for the interconnection of data from different sources.
• Processing time for reasoning: In the context of ST, reasoning refers to the process of inferring information from a set of asserted facts. Reasoning time is directly dependent on the complexity of the expected inferences (i.e., the logical association on a set of facts). Currently this is a very time and resource “expensive” process. In fact, most of suppliers avoid the use of complex reasoning on their tools and consider processing time for reasoning as a blocker for the development of real-time applications.
• Integration tools: The lack of integration tools refers to a number of aspects. It shows most prominently when trying to combine large data bases, but also applies to attempts at combining multiple existing ST.

Market blockers
Semantic Technology providers consider market issues as important as technological ones. The most referred by interviewees are:

• Tendency in large corporations to keep internal solutions proprietary as a business advantage. Thus there is no interest in collaboration with competitors, and sometimes not even with business partners.
• Difficulty to reach the right people at customer organizations.
• Difficulty to find a common language. This includes internal technical language used by the customers vs. academic language used by the providers
• Trouble to identify problems at the customer side. Often, customers are not aware of their problems–or rather of the power of technologies as a solution.
• In many cases, there are no market models or incentives for cooperation

These blockers are very habitual when a new technology is struggling to gain a place in the market. Nevertheless there is a big consensus among the experts that the advantages of using these technologies are far more important than the drawbacks, and in the next years they will go mainstream.

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