Many businesses depend on a very complex and heterogeneous mix of information. Solving a customer problem, managing a workflow, establishing a supply chain or designing a new product requires integrating many different sources of information from many different enterprise systems.
This is a huge and diverse problem area which has spawned many important industry product streams. For example integrating the information on supply chain and demand information is at the heart of products such as Enterprise Resource Planners like SAP; integrating metadata to manage document and records content is the core of Enterprise Document Management. Within these huge areas the specific sub problems of data integration (providing gateways onto different data stores and data models) and application integration (infrastructure for propagating changes in the data between applications to invoke the business logic or services of one application from another) are distinct subthemes and are themselves multi-billion dollar industries.
The typical approach taken by existing products is often a centralizing one. A single application suite is used to provide the desired integrated service and includes common information models. The connecting applications are either replaced by ones which conform to the centralized standard or they are placed behind wrappers or gateways which allows them to interoperate with the central solution.
The semantic web offers relevant standards and approaches that can help with these problems. It offers open standards that can enable vendor neutral solutions, it offers a useful flexibility (structured and semi-structured, formal and informal, open extensibility) and it helps to support decentralized solutions where that is appropriate.
It is not a panacea. Many of the underlying problems are fundamentally hard in terms of scale, incompatibility of information models or lack of known semantics for existing data and the semantic web is not a magic wand that side steps such issues.
Rather than expect semantic web tools to displace existing data and application integration products we would expect to see vendors of such products start to support semantic web interoperability and begin to reuse some of the approaches. Brandsoft's entry in the Enterprise Document Management space is, perhaps, an early example of this.
We would also expect new products to arise catering to specific business integration problems which are particularly good matches to the semantic web's strengths and weaknesses. For example, some industries such as aerospace and pharmaceuticals depend on a very expensive and knowledge intensive design process that requires much deeper and more specialist information integration than offered by generic enterprise document management suites. It is not surprising to find that bioscience is one of the most active areas of semantic web application.