Joe Lamantia.com

On Semantics At The Enterprise Level

In the same way that information architecture helps take users' understandings of the structure, meaning, and organization of information into account at the level of domain-specific user experiences, information spaces, and systems, the complex semantic boundaries and relationships that define and link enterprise-level domains is a natural area of activity for enterprise information architecture.

Looking for some technically oriented materials related to this level of IA - what I call enterprise semantic frameworks - I came across a solid article titled Enterprise Semantics: Aligning Service-Oriented Architecture with the Business in the Web Services Journal.

The authors - Joram Borenstein and Joshua Fox - take a web-services perspective on the business benefits of enterprise-level semantic efforts, but they do a good job of laying out the case for the importance of semantic concepts, understanding, and alignment at the enterprise level.

From the article abtract:

"Enterprises need transparency, a clear view of what is happening in the organization. They also need agility, which is the ability to respond quickly to changes in the internal and external environments. Finally, organizations require integration: the smooth interoperation of applications across organizational boundaries. Encoding business concepts in a formal semantic model helps to achieve these goals and also results in additional corollary benefits. This semantic model serves as a focal point and enables automated discovery and transformation services in an organization."

They also offer some references at the conclusion of the article:

• Borenstein, J. and , J. (2003). "Semantic Discovery for Web Services." Web Services Journal. SYS-CON Publications, Inc. Vol. 3, issue 4. www.sys-con.com/webservices/articleprint.cfm?id=507


• Cowles, P. (2005). "Web Service API and the Semantic Web." Web Services Journal. SYS-CON Publications, Inc. Vol. 5, issue 2. www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=39631&DE=1


• Genovese, Y., Hayword, S., and Comport, J. (2004). "SOA Will Demand Re-engineering of Business Applications." Gartner. October 8.


• Linthicum, D. (2005). "When Building Your SOA...Service Descriptions Are Key." WebServices.Org. March 2005. www.webservices.org/ws/content/view/full/56944


• Schulte, R.W., Valdes, R., and Andrews, W. (2004). "SOA and Web Services Offer Little Vendor Independence." Gartner. April 8.
• W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group: www.w3.org/2002/ws/arch/

local tags: architecture, business, enterprise, ia, metadata, modeling, semantics, semanticweb