Semantic Arts was launched in the summer of 2000. In 2001, the Tim Berners-Lee article in Scientific American hit the newsstands. It looked like it would only be a matter of time before companies were clamoring for Semantic Technology.
It was a matter of time. A lot of time. For most of those early years the crew bid on and performed traditional IT consulting projects (feasibility studies, requirements analysis, long-range IT plans, architecture designs, and the like). Every project was executed using Sematic Technology, mostly in the background, occasionally surfacing in some deliverables.
Dave McComb wrote Semantics in Business Systems in 2003 and co-founded the Semantic Technology Conference in 2007. And as Yogi Berra has so famously observed, “They stayed away in droves.” Finally, the ice began to melt. Companies began asking for semantics. The “O” word (Ontology) could be uttered in polite company. The firm began building ontologies and designing semantic architectures to implement them. And the ontologies and architectures languished on bookshelves.
The firm pivoted. Semantic Arts needed to become enablers, so they built architectures, loaded the architecture with ontologies, and populated it with triples. As with many software companies they built their own internal systems using the approaches they espoused, in the process known as “eating your own dog food.” By building their own systems with the technology they recommended to clients, they get an early preview of what works and what doesn’t work.
