Knowledge is Power Best Practices in Semantics Management
Knowledge is power. Though said in the 16th century by author and philosopher, Sir Francis Bacon, the meaning of the phrase is even more applicable today as companies around the world are dealing with an overwhelming amount of data stored on computers, servers, flash drives, PDAs and other storage devices scattered throughout the enterprise. The information, email messages, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, graphs, photographs and other content trapped in information silos across the enterprise, contain a significant amount of knowledge that can benefit the organization. Unfortunately for many companies, much of this information remains untapped, unsearchable and trapped in disjointed systems.
Enterprises have deployed a complex web of information management systems, applications, operating systems and databases, to manage and deploy data and content. However, the resulting information-access systems are unable to exchange information in an efficient, dynamic fashion because they lack a common understanding of the business semantics that describe the information contained in the various content silos. Marketing may have one way to describe a new product, while IT, shipping, public relations and research and development may each have others. When something in the product lifecycle changes—a name, a feature, a color or price, for example—then searching and finding all the information across the enterprise related to that product can be a chore, if not impossible.
Business semantics management provides organizations with a dynamic registry to model, govern, publish and collaborate around a consensus of terms and term relationships that define the products, services and organizational knowledge of the enterprise. Business semantics management is emerging as a core component of service- oriented architecture (SOA), which distributes applications that perform services on demand. For many experts, SOA is the future of software, where applications, used internally or externally, are delivered as services. Companies such as SchemaLogic of Kirkland, WA, have developed a business semantics management solution that models complex business semantics relationships and provides those models to subscribing systems as a service within the context of an SOA. Referred to as "semantics-as-a-service," the solution provides a single source for creating, managing and distributing corporate semantics.
Semantics-as-a-service can be delivered as a real-time service to enable organizations to instantly update their semantics models as changes happen, or manage their semantics with regular and consistent updates. Semantics-as-a-service can be deployed behind the firewall or as a Web-based application. As enterprises move towards SOA and Web services environments, semantics-as-a-service has emerged as a business-critical solution that can help to enhance knowledge management. The evolution of semantics management from a manual time-consuming, cumbersome process to real-time through semantics-as-a-service is a revolutionary concept that is changing the way companies are managing their information assets and their businesses.
Increasingly, companies are finding that developing a truly effective enterprise lexicon requires the participation of all stakeholders in a company, from the purchasing manager to the CTO. Semantics-as-a-service allows organizations to collaborate and leverage the knowledge and expertise of a variety of sources, including subject-matter experts, business users and domain experts to develop a semantics model that describes the corporate lexicon, provides up-to-the minute know-how and makes knowledge accessible across the organization. SchemaLogic's centrally managed solution and Web-based collaboration service helps to develop corporate semantics models that can be used enterprisewide to describe their business, products, services and overall corporate knowledge.