Integration "In The Large"

Position paper accepted at the W3C Workshop on Data and Services Integration, October 20-21 2011, Bedford, MA, USA

Integration "In The Large"

Ian Oliver, Ora Lassila

Nokia

September 2011

The original goals of the Semantic Web - and in some degree also those of its younger cousin" Linked Data - are to provide novel solutions for the integration and interoperability of systems, and to move towards a situation where more information work can be automated. These solutions are well understood in the small", as we can relatively easily define and expose the semantics of any system of limited scope, but larger-scale integration still eludes us. This is due to the fact that ultimately reconciling the semantic differences of many individual systems at the level of data is destined to suffer from issues of achieving consistent global agreements (and as such we are dealing not only with technical issues, but also and perhaps more importantly with social and organizational challenges).