Agents, i.e. communicating distributed processes, acting on behalf of human users, will play a far greater role. Again, for agents in a distributed system to be effective, ontologies and ontology-based metadata are indispensable. Agents enter the Semantic Web at different levels. As much as they make use of the semantic infrastructure they can also contribute to the creation and maintenance of that infrastructure. Agent based computing appears to be the appropriate paradigm to work in a complex world with multiple ontologies, fragments and multiple inferencing engines.
Business opportunities related to the notion of a Semantic Web seem to abound.
XML alone is not a panacea. Unlike today, with most content still being available for free, content itself will be a commodity in a future Web, subject to both B2C selling and B2B trading. In order to be on the winners side all parties involved in these games will have to rethink their approaches and strategies. They also covered some of the business aspects, with clear ideas on exploitation. The final discussion picked up on several of the issues raised by the invited speakers and in the short contributions.