How Semantic Technology Fits Into the Enterprise

Business is all about relationships: the relationships between one employee and another, organized into a staff hierarchy, and into departments and business units; the relationships between these departments and the internal resources of the company. Then of course there's the relationships between the company and its customers and partners, either as a whole, or increasingly — in this age of blogs, wikis, and personalized customer experience — between individuals within the company and their outside correspondents.
Information is the lifeblood of these relationships, and business have recently been paying more respect to this fact by putting enterprise data architecture (EDA) high on the agenda. But a lot of the EDA mainstream is constructed on technologies designed for managing focused structures of well-organized data, which does not fit very well with the explosion of information relationships in modern business. Most people accept the emergence of basic EDA discipline as a good thing, but some people feel it's time for a new approach that puts rich data relationships at the foundations.
"Semantic technology" is a broad name for the technology that deals with such rich data relationships, and "semantic web" describes the subset of such technology that's built on Web technology.