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As semantic web technologies begin to penetrate the enterprise, IT personnel will need to adapt along with the emerging technology. It's never too early to start thinking about what skill sets will be needed for IT workers to remain gainfully employed in a fast-changing industry. So we asked some experts to share their insight into what IT pros who want to get in on the ground floor of the semantic web should be thinking about.

Semantic web stealth company EVRI.com, for example, is actively looking for IT pros with a variety of expertise, including the basic skills on the development side that most modern web software companies want: Java, C++, Ruby on Rails, and the like.

But Neil Rosen, the former CTO of Amazon and now the CEO of EVRI.com, checks off a number of requirements for positions in more specialized domain areas, such as natural language processing, web and machine learning, information retrieval and search, AI technologies, and various kinds of data librarian or ontologist positions. Of EVRI, Rosen will say only that it is not a semantic web search startup, but a company that wants to help people search less and read and find more. A semantic web consumer products company like EVRI will have additional requirements of IT personnel, he says.

"In the past, semantic web efforts, or at least semantic data analysis efforts, were in a single domain for a specialist audience -- pharma, for instance -- but when you get to the consumer space, you need large-scale, distributed systems experience," he says. "In our case, it is a highly distributed system, so distributed system engineering is a really key skill -- people who can build large-scale systems, highly-deployed onto many, many hosts, and keep them up and running."

Another tweak on skill sets for the semantic web era will be the definition of the interaction designer, at least in EVRI's case. "This is someone who knows how to build new and compelling user experiences for a specific problem -- here, it's having lots of interrelated data that you have to make clear to an average user," Rosen said. "That requires someone who has worked with lots of data and data visualization."

Kendall Clark, co-founder and managing principal of Clark & Parsia LLC, a consulting and research and development firm specializing in semantic web and advanced systems, says that some IT pros are taking the wrong attitude about the semantic web-- which might hurt their competitiveness in the job market down the road. "One thing that we keep getting wrong in the U.S. is that working professionals in IT keep dismissing semantic technologies as 'too academic;' but every important enterprise technology can trace its roots to computer science, to theory, and to university R&D. This is often code for 'we don't have the skills.' It's just as often simply misinformed talk."

In Clark's view, the basic application of semantic technology to the enterprise market is information integration, fusion, and policy management. So, as for skills, the two big ones he sees are ontology modeling and ontology engineering. "Machine learning, as well. Logic programming, generally, will see something of a resurgence. That doesn't mean Prolog, but mostly Java and various high level declarative semantic languages," he notes. "Good data modeling is important now but will become more so."

Colin Britton, co-founder and CTO of semantic web company Metatomix, notes that semantic technologies provide the capability to move more of the application's behavior and policies back into the business analyst's role. "The business analyst becomes the specifier and IT the developers," Britton says, and the amount of custom application development is reduced. "By the nature of how some of the [semantic] standards work, it enables organizations to leverage other people's reusable IP. Organizations and communities of interest get to move from writing down things on a piece of paper to expressing them in a standards-based schema. It's a more open world of information management."

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