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IT professionals need to think about how the development of the semantic web will affect their careers. At the same time, business leaders need to think about how they're going to get the pros with semantic technology skills on board their teams, or otherwise get access to that talent, whether for enterprise integration needs or to build consumer-oriented services.

"It is a reasonably tight market right now," says Neil Roseman, Amazon's former VP of digital media services and now the CEO of EVRI.com, a semantic web startup focused on helping people find things on the web with less search. "When the market is hot and very active, the best people already have good jobs."

So finding the top-tier engineers and user interface designers is harder than it would have been a few years ago, and hiring can be particularly challenging for filling posts in EVRI's specialty domains of search, natural languages, and artificial intelligence. (For an idea of what skills are needed, go to "Sharpen Your Skills for the Semantic Web.")

"Looking for someone with five to 10 years of natural language processing will add to the complexity, vs. saying you're looking for a kick-ass Java developer," Roseman says.

Depending on the business and how it plans to use semantic technologies, some parts of the talent quest may be easier than others, with in-house staff already primed for the job. Take, for example, enterprises that want to use the technology for integration purposes.

Robert Shimp, vp of Oracle's global technology business unit, thinks that SQL or relational databases are very similar in approach, "so the typical database architect or administrator really doesn't have to learn very much beyond what they know about how to use SQL. That's another fortuitous aspect for Oracle… All the data that we manage is quite readily transferable or transformable into a semantic-based model, if you will," he says. Since Oracle supports the core data standards for the semantic web inside its database, Shimp expects it will be fairly easy for typical database developers to pick up on the technology and create whole new classes of applications that can tap into multiple databases and make new connections among information.

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, advises companies that want to move ahead in this area to hire better and bust barriers.

"Hire more PhDs in computer science," Clark said. "Break down the organizational barriers between R&D and product development. If you don't have R&D or a skunkworks group that's looking out 3 to 5 years, why not? Even a small group (under 10 people) can make a big difference, if they're the right people. You can't be a leader in IT without paying smart people to be on the cutting edge."

Those smart people, he says, can be found externally if, for some reason, a business isn't hiring such talent directly or trying to build it within its existing staff. Some of the big guns in the consulting business, like Booz Allen Hamilton, are developing expertise in this area. "If that's not a capacity you want to develop in-house, then you either have to depend on your IT vendors to do it for you, but they have their own agendas, or you have to outsource it. In that case, I run a company that does precisely that, so that's one self-interested thing I can say here," he said.

Roseman thinks outsourcing could become a viable option for some companies when it comes to dealing with the operational parts of the semantic web. Even off-shoring that work to low-cost locales would be little different in the main than the typical web, application, and infrastructure implementations or maintenance that some companies offshore today. But when it comes to acquiring talent needed for the development of a semantic web consumer product, such as the one EVRI is working on, he thinks that's a different story.

"It's harder to outsource, even if it is to your own offices that are far away, a product development role remotely," he says. "Building a brand new technology to launch new products is hard to do in a true outsourced model. It's strategic to what you are doing, and you can't really outsource that."

But Roseman is pretty confident EVRI isn't going to have a problem meeting its talent needs. Some big companies might need an army of developers, but as a startup Roseman doesn't expect EVRI to need more than 100 or so in the next three to five years. "We should be OK," he said.

On the other hand, EVRI is fortunate in that people are excited about startups again.

"It's a good time to be a startup again. It's not that any particular role is especially hard to find, but finding the top tier engineers and UI designers is harder than it had been a number of years ago because the market is so good right now."

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