Semantic services are those capabilities in the data infrastructure that allow us to represent semantic models, identify model-to-model relationships, and execute the necessary translations to reconcile data with differing semantic models. This is essentially a fancy way of saying that this layer contains the set of business rules and mechanisms for ensuring that the data has consistent meaning. This can be as simple as an identity correspondence translation (that is, the thing labeled 123 over here is the same thing as the thing labeled ABC over there) or as complex as inferred relationships based on semantic formalisms such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and using semantic expression mechanisms such as Web Ontology Language (OWL). In either case, this layer contains the representations of the actions required to reserve consistent meaning across different data structures and repositories.
Gartner - The Emerging Vision for Data Services: Becoming Information-Centric in an SOA World - 24 April 2006
Metatomix’s Semantic Services are a specialized class of capabilities optimized to build real-time intelligent integration applications that require the iterative correlation of many types of data (structured, unstructured and semi-structured) within a decisioning framework that dictate next actions based on state.
In addition to being the building blocks of Metatomix applications, these services can also be called within an SOA deployment, offering it’s capabilities within a broader context.
