Semantic Web Business Applications- A Scalability Model for the New Digital Economy

Semantic web technologies are considered to be the next wave for web technologies related with rich internet web applications, content management, and document and information management. The most promising semantic web applications for business domain are considered to be the semantic web business portals which integrate diverse business information. Because semantic web applications are working with ontologies or data vocabularies there is a need to permanently assure the links between publicly available vocabularies on the web disposed at different addresses and diverse information which comes from different web sources. This means for semantic web business applications a scalability problem. The present paper discusses the architecture of semantic web business application useful for assuring the scalability. We discuss the scalability problem in terms of data access and information retrieval. We conduct a series of experiments in order to test the scalability problems. Finally a so called scalability model is proposed. The main contributions of the present paper consist in presenting the main problems that a semantic web business application presents in terms of scalability. We also contribute to the semantic web business applications field by presenting a framework to measure scalability.