The Semantic Web is such a seductive idea: The only problem is that no matter how powerful or even how easily implemented it’s techniques and technologies become, it will never become the entire Web.

The reason it will be limited in scope is that there will always be a huge amount of Web content where the owner simply won't care about their data having a well-defined context. This could be for reasons that will range from simply not caring right through to proprietary content that the owner will want to be private and “protected.” Click here for more Semantic Web skepticism.

In other words, the Semantic Web of the near future – say, the next decade – will probably be a small percentage of the total Web. The problem with this situation is that where there’s data on a Web site that could be useful, more often than not, will lack a structure that makes it useful in another context.

This, in turn, means that those organizations that want to create “mashups” to re-purpose multiple data sources will have to rely on smart tools to interpret and provide context for the data. A solution for doing just this is the Kapow Mashup Server offered by Kapow Technologies.

The Kapow Mashup Server allows you to create “robots” – processes that can use RSS and ATOM feeds, Web content, Web services, various databases, PDF documents and Excel spreadsheets as inputs and transform all or part of them, then combines them with other resources to create outputs to databases, XML data files, RSS feeds, or integrate with enterprise applications such as content management systems.

The Kapow Mashup Server can create three types of architectural mashups: Presentation-level mashups by “reusing the Web interface of existing Web-enabled applications in your portal”; data/content-based mashups by “collecting data from any enterprise data source, spanning both unstructured data sources, such as Web data — or structured data stored in databases”; and logic-based mashups that integrate “business logic and functionality of any Web-enabled application into your application.”

The Kapow Mashup Server “family” includes a Data Collection Edition, “which enables API-based access to a wide variety of structured and unstructured data from a wide variety of sources, both in the Web tier and the filesystem,” and the Portal Content Edition, which “enables cost-effective delivery of Web based content and functionality into portal servers.”

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.