Business semantics management (BSM) encompasses the technology, methodology, organization, and culture that brings business stakeholders together to collaboratively realize the reconciliation of their heterogeneous metadata; and consequently the application of the derived business semantics patterns to establish semantic alignment between the underlying data structures. BSM is established by two complementary process cycles each grouping a number of activities. The first cycle is the semantic reconciliation cycle, and the second cycle is the semantic application cycle. The two cycles are tied together by the unification process. This double process cycle is iteratively applied until an optimal balance of differences and commonalities between stakeholders are reached that meets the

semantic integration Semantic integration is the process of interrelating information from diverse sources, for example calendars and to do lists, email archives, presence information (physical, psychological, and social), documents of all sorts, contacts (including ...

requirements. This approach is based on research on community-based

ontology engineering In computer science, information science and systems engineering, ontology engineering is a field which studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, which encompasses a representation, formal naming and definition of the categori ...

that is validated in European projects, government and industry.

Semantic reconciliation

Semantic reconciliation is a process cycle constituted of four subsequent activities: scope, create, refine, and articulate. First, the community is scoped: user roles and

affordance Affordance is what the environment offers the individual. American psychologist James J. Gibson coined the term in his 1966 book, ''The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems'', and it occurs in many of his earlier essays. However, his best-know ...

s are appointed. Next, relevant facts are collected from documentation such as, e.g., natural language descriptions, (legacy)

logical schema A logical data model or logical schema is a data model of a specific problem domain expressed independently of a particular database management product or storage technology ( physical data model) but in terms of data structures such as relational t ...

s, or other metadata and consequently decomposing this scope in elicitation contexts. The deliverable of scoping is an initial upper common

ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exi ...

that organizes the key upper common patterns that are shared and accepted by the community. These upper common patterns define the current

semantic interoperability Semantic interoperability is the ability of computer systems to exchange data with unambiguous, shared meaning. Semantic interoperability is a requirement to enable machine computable logic, inferencing, knowledge discovery, and data federation bet ...

requirements of the community. Once the community is scoped, all stakeholders syntactically refine and semantically articulate these upper common patterns.

Unification

During unification, a new proposal for the next version of the upper common ontology is produced, aligning relevant parts from the common and divergent stakeholder perspectives. If the semantic reconciliation results in a number of reusable language-neutral and context-independent patterns for constructing business semantics that are articulated with informal meaning descriptions, then the unification is worthwhile.

Semantic application

Semantic application is a process cycle constituted of two subsequent activities: select and commit where the scoped information systems are committed to selected consolidated business semantic patterns. This is done by first selecting relevant patterns from the pattern base. Next, the interpretation of this selection is semantically constrained. Finally, the various scoped sources and services are mapped on (read: committed to) this selection. The selection and axiomatization of this selection should approximate the intended business semantics. This can be verified by automatically verbalization into natural language, and validation of the unlocked data. Validation or deprecation of the commitments may result in another iteration of the semantic reconciliation cycle.

Business semantics

Business semantics are the information concepts that live in the organization, understandable for both business and IT. Business semantics describe the business concepts as they are used and needed by the business instead of describing the information from a technical point of view. One important aspect of business semantics is that they are shared between many disparate data sources. Many data sources share the same semantics but have different syntax, or format to describe the same concepts. The way these business semantics are described is less important. Several approaches can be used such as

Unified Modeling Language The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. The creation of UML was originally m ...

object-role modeling Object-role modeling (ORM) is used to model the semantics of a universe of discourse. ORM is often used for data modeling and software engineering. An object-role model uses graphical symbols that are based on first order predicate logic and se ...

. This corresponds to Robert Meersman's statement that semantics are "a (set of) mapping(s) from your representation language to agreed

concept Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by ...

s (objects, relationships, behavior) in the real-world". In the construction of

information system An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems are composed by four components: task, people ...

s, semantics have always been crucial, also a concept known as

double articulation In linguistics, double articulation, duality of patterning, or duality is the fundamental language phenomenon consisting of the use of combinations of a small number of meaningless elements (sounds, that is, phonemes) to produce a large number of m ...

. In previous approaches, these semantics were left implicit (i.e. In the mind of reader or writer), hidden away in the implementation itself (e.g., in a

database table A table is a collection of related data held in a table format within a database. It consists of columns and rows. In relational databases, and flat file databases, a ''table'' is a set of data elements (values) using a model of vertical colum ...

or column code) or informally captured in

textual In literary theory, textuality comprises all of the attributes that distinguish the communicative content under analysis as an object of study. It is associated with structuralism and post-structuralism. Explanation Textuality is not just ab ...

documentation. According to Dave McComb, "The scale and scope of our systems and the amount of information we now have to deal with are straining that model." Nowadays, information systems need to interact in a more open manner, and it becomes crucial to formally represent and apply the semantics these systems are concerned with.

Application

Business semantics management empowers all stakeholders in the organization by a consistent and aligned definition of the important information assets of the organization. The available business semantics can be leveraged in the so-called business/social layer of the organization. They can for example be coupled to a

content management Content management (CM) is a set of processes and technologies that supports the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. When stored and accessed via computers, this information may be more specifically referre ...

application to provide the business with a consistent business vocabulary or enable better navigation or classification of information, leveraged by enterprise search engines to make richer semantic web ready websites, etc.. Business semantics can also be used to increase operational efficiency in the technical/operation layer of the organization. It provides an abstracted way to access and deliver data in a more efficient manner. In that respect, it is similar to

Enterprise Information Integration Enterprise information integration (EII) is the ability to support an unified view of data and information for an entire organization. In a data virtualization application of EII, a process of information integration, using data abstraction to pr ...

(EII) with the added benefit that the shared models are not described in technical terms but in a way that is easily understood by the business.

References