by Dave McComb | May 15, 2012 | The Whiteboard
A good ontology simplifies your information management systems because it creates an enterprise-wide definition of what things are called and their interrelationships. In our experience, even the complex requirements of multi-billion, global companies can be organized...
by Dave McComb | May 15, 2012 | The Whiteboard
The world of traditional information technology is black or white. If something isn’t the same, then it is different. Every new distinction requires the creation of a new table. This creates a problem because once a new table is created the concept is considered...
by Dave McComb | May 14, 2012 | The Whiteboard
Inference is one of the ways that semantic technology simplifies information systems. Many of the manual assertions that must be made in the traditional systems can happen automatically in a semantic model. The more things you can infer, the fewer you need to assert,...
by Dave McComb | May 11, 2012 | The Whiteboard
The cynical response is to invoke the “Gartner Hype Cycle” and say it’s been overhyped. But that just begs the question: why do things get overhyped? In general the reason is that someone comes up with a new approach to solving a vexing problem. At...
by Dave McComb | May 11, 2012 | The Whiteboard
Since the semantic model is free of structure, it is easier to map concepts to different structural representations enabling reuse of classes and properties. Reuse is a profound way to reduce complexity. In a traditional system, attributes are not reused. Every time...
by Dave McComb | May 10, 2012 | The Whiteboard
An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is not a product but a style of architectural development. It is essentially SOA done right. The essence of an ESB is that all apps and all services talk only to the bus and not directly to each other. To the extent that they talk to...
by Dave McComb | May 10, 2012 | The Whiteboard
Semantic technology uses ontologies to describe the business in a way that both humans and machines can understand. Since the semantic schema is independent from actual computer systems, e.g., legacy or future applications and databases, it allows us to find the...
by Dave McComb | May 9, 2012 | The Whiteboard
Sentara Healthcare is a $3 billion conglomerate that includes hospitals, clinics, physician networks, insurance companies, research centers, etc. It offers thousands of services to over two million patients. It is a very complex business. Always on the cutting edge of...
by Dave McComb | May 8, 2012 | The Whiteboard
At Procter & Gamble, over 10,000 people work in R&D in hundreds of different disciplines. P&G had no traditional information systems capturing the critical information in this brain trust. They engaged Semantic Arts to create an ontology that would...
by Dave McComb | Nov 28, 2011 | The Whiteboard
In the late 80’s, I was introduced to the “Don’t Care” Architecture by Sherman Woo, of what was then US West (now Qwest). The Internet existed but the World Wide Web didn’t. Sherman was spearheading something he called the “Global...
