Team Building – The Importance of an Ontology Effective communication is something that many in the C-suite aspire to have in their organization. But what does this really entail in practice? At one level, it is about the high-level aspirations of the organization, the expectations of clients, the hopes of investors, and so on. At...Continue reading→

From Labels to Verbs –Child’s Play! Watching a child acquire their first language skills is nothing like acquiring a new language. The 2-year-old is learning vocalisation, and also ensuring that they get the correct labels for the things around them. “Mummy”, “Daddy”, “cat”, “car”, “sea” and so on. Often this is done with gestures and...Continue reading→

The Case for Enterprise Ontology   I was asked by one of our senior staff why someone might want an enterprise ontology.  From my perspective, there are three main categories of value for integrating all your  enterprise’s data into a single core:  Economy  For many of our clients there is an opportunity that stems from...Continue reading→

How a “User” Knowledge Graph Can Help Change Data Culture Identity and Access Management (IAM) has had the same problem since  Fernando Corbató of MIT first dreamed up the idea of digital passwords in  1960: opacity. Identity in the physical world is rich and well-articulated, with a wealth of different ways to verify information on...Continue reading→

Zero Copy Integration and Radical Simplification Dave McComb’s book Software Wasteland underscored a fundamental problem:  Enterprise software sometimes costs 1,000 times more than it ought to. The poster child for cost overruns was highlighted in the book was Healthcare.gov, a public registration system for the US Affordable Care Act, enacted in 2010. By 2018, the...Continue reading→

A Knowledge Model for Explainable Military AI  Forrest Hare, Founder of Summit Knowledge Solutions, is a retired US Air Force targeting and information operations officer who now works with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). His  experience includes integrating intelligence from different types of communications, signals,  imagery, open source, telemetry, and other sources into a cohesive...Continue reading→

How US Homeland Security Plans to Use Knowledge Graph During this summer’s Data Centric Architecture Forum, Ryan Riccucci, Division Chief for  U.S. Border Patrol – Tucson (AZ) Sector, and his colleague Eugene Yockey gave a glimpse of what the data environment is like within the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as how...Continue reading→

SIX AXES OF DECOUPLING   Loose coupling has been a Holy Grail for systems developers for generations. The virtues of loose coupling have been widely lauded, yet there has been little description about what is needed to achieve loose coupling.  In this paper we describe our observations from projects we’ve been involved with.  Coupling   Two systems or...Continue reading→

Documents, Events and Actions   We have recently been reexamining the weird relationship of “documents” to “events” in enterprise information systems and have surfaced some new insights that are worth  sharing.   Documents and Events  Just to make sure we are all seeing things clearly, the documents we’re referring to are  those that give rise to financial...Continue reading→

gist: Buckets, Buckets Everywhere:  Who Knows What to Think We humans are categorizing machines, which is to say, we like to create metaphorical buckets and put things inside. But there are different kinds of buckets, and different ways to model them in  OWL and gist. The most common bucket represents a kind of thing, such as...Continue reading→