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Defining Enterprise Semantics
September 15, 2005 08:31 AM | Posted in: Information ArchitectureJP Morgenthal of DMReview.com offers a snapshot of the process for defining enterprise semantics in Enterprise Architecture: The Holistic View: The Role of Semantics in Business.
Morgenthal says, "When you understand the terms that your business uses to conduct business and you understand how those terms impact your business, you can see clearly how to support and maintain the processes that use those terms with minimal effort."
Not a surprise, but how to make it happen, and how to explain that to the business?
- Capture - In this phase of the process a representative for each business process establishes the vocabulary and their meanings required to support that process. For example, in a supply chain process the representative might capture words, such as buyer, transport or payment method. In addition to these words the representative would explain what these terms mean in relation to the process.
- Categorization - In this phase, the vocabularies across all processes are organized into a system... The system can be a simple taxonomic structure that simply relates process to vocabulary, or it can be a more complex ontological structure that captures the relationships of words across processes.
- Leverage - This is phase where the technical staff implements the vocabularies in the form of a dictionary or registry. This dictionary can represent a simple lookup facility or it can become an active part of the infrastructure feeding the business rules and business process engines.
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Great posts (Wed & Thurs), Joe.
I think we need to position the enterprise information architect as the focal point of these three initiatives. Indeed, while the business process representative might have a vocabulary, the user of that process also has a vocabulary. In yesterday's EIA seminar, Lou Rosenfeld (who says "hi" to ya, btw) had us do a neat, simple, yet illustrative exercise: using the same object, groups divided into product developer, marketer, and user had to come up with terms to describe it.
Very interesting.
Also, he decried a reliance on taxonomy and metadata. He opines that it's ultimately not possible to create one overarching taxonomy for an enterprise. Instead, specific domains might use some controlled vocabularies & taxonomies.