As data warehouse appliances gain momentum across the data centers of the world, a renewed push is occurring to adapt to the cloud. As we move towards this thought process, a challenge arises in how to make the data warehouse more SOA ready. This is where we need to understand the notion of semantic web modeling. This is the newest trend that will evolve to become the trendsetter in the next five years.

The data warehouse of the future is more of a data services layer and will be a shared services setup. In that world, web portals and mobile gadgets will be the user interface and queries will be more non-sql and structured in English like sentences of questions. This is where web semantic modeling will play a critical role, right from services and interfaces to reports and kpis.

Today this concept is largely still in its nascent state, and is a very evolving subject. In the next five years we will see a large scale growth of this idea. In the current world of data warehouses and analytics, we have tossed Metadata as a nice to have feature or a dressing on the cake, but when we move to the new world, the Metadata layer is the Cake itself to a large extent.

Stay tuned for a detailed article next month in my column on this subject.

Looking back through the years this has been a favorite question that has been asked repeatedly in the BI community. Why do BI projects fail