Siince the advent of electronic commerce and electronic data interchange (EDI), semantics of data have always been an issue. While early systems used proprietary interfaces to share data, standards like COBRA or web services could partly solve the protocol issue. However, the impedance mismatch is not completely solved until the semantic gap can be eliminated. While the XML family of standards enabled the translation of data based on syntactic rules (XSLT), the semantic web approach is about adding semantics to data. Many research work is currently undertaken addressing a range of issues. Semantic data representation, ontology development, querying semantic data, mapping and merging ontologies, translation of data between different ontologies, as well as semantic web services are only a few areas of current research. Even the industry has begun to apply ontologies to manage and share data. Because many people are uncertain about the possibilities and benefits of ontologies especially concerning electronic data integration, this invited talk will give an overview of chances and existing misconceptions. Expectations and potentialities will be opposed while putting the focus on semantic data integration.