M2M IOT

Software, Ontologies & "The Semantic Ceiling"

Is it possible that even with today's excitement and real achievement in software and technology, especially around mobile, M2M ("machine-to-machine"), the IOT ("Internet of Things"), analytics, so-called "big data" and machine learning, just to name a few hot topics du jour, that there is a major roadblock to further easy progress in technology?

After decades of achievement in the development of software technologies and software engineering, the software industry is rightly acknowledged as having contributed enormously to every aspect of business, social and personal life.  It is a general belief, fostered by both science and culture that a "long revolution" based on IT will continue on, bringing ever more amazing, delightful and useful innovations.

This expectation of progress can probably be depicted as a linear function with a nice upward slope.  While "Whiggish" expectations of continual progress are nice, the reality of software engineering is less rosy.  The realization of future progress based on software technology may not be so easily achieved and the immediate future of software development may be disappointing.

Why is there a potential for disappointment?

The current state of software engineering and data management is characterized by what could be called a "semantic ceiling".  On the software engineering side, the newest software products and software development are, while often quite wonderful, still rather limited in what they accomplish:  mashups, social applications, situational applications, modeling tools, more SOA, point business applications etcThe scope of these new applications is typically either siloed or trivial in some sense

Especially on the data management side, the growth of data resources has exacerbated the data chaos that confronts both business and individual trying to make use of technology.  For this reason, it is not surprising that master data management (MDM) is a hot area in the software business.

The idea of a semantic ceiling is the idea that further progress in software engineering will only be possible with the development and deployment of a new layer of semantic technology.

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