Semantic Alignment Vision Paper

Tools Add

In today’s business ecosystems, information has become a competitive and strategic asset. Being able to exchange data and to interpret the information in the data that has been exchanged in the right context and within a reasonable time is a top priority for many organizations.

Starting from three simple but serious questions regarding data semantics, data utilization, and data governance that pop up daily in information-intensive enterprises, we easily identify a value proposition for semantic alignment. However, current techniques that claim to create semantic alignment in this sense are unsatisfactory, both theoretically and as far as the quality of the results is concerned. They systemically ignore the subtle gap that looms between information sharing among people (i.e. knowledge sharing) at the business/social level on the one hand; and information sharing between computer systems (i.e. data exchange) at the operational/technical level on the other hand.

A solution requires organizations to look beyond mere technical fits and think in terms of mechanisms that transcend their IT infrastructure to a sustainable information-centric infrastructure that meaningfully aligns business with IT. To achieve this goal, we pinpoint two essential requirements: business semantics management and data services.

Download Paper