Semantic Arts exists to shepherd organizations on their Data-Centric journey.
Our core capabilities include:
• Semantic Knowledge Graph Development and Implementation
• Legacy Avoidance, Erosion, and Replacement
We can help your organization to fix the tangled mess of information in your enterprise systems while discovering ways to dissolve data silos and reduce integration debt.
What is Data-Centric?
Data-Centric is about reversing the priority of data and applications.
Right now, applications rule. Applications own “their” data (it’s really your data, but good luck with that). When you have 1,000 applications (which most large firms do) you have 1,000 incompatible data silos. This serves to further the entrenchment of legacy systems, with no real motivation for change.
Data-Centric says data and their models come first. Applications conform to the data, not the other way around. Almost everyone is surprised at the fundamental simplicity, once it’s been articulated.
It sounds simple, but fifty years of “application-centricity” is a hard habit to break. We specialize in helping firms make this transition. We recognize that in addition to new technology and design skills, a major part of most projects is helping shepherd the social change that this involves.
If you’re fed up with application-centricity and the IT-fad-of-the-month club, contact us.
Read More: What is Data-Centric?
What about those legacy systems?
The move to a more data-centric architecture requires thoughtful planning. Early phases look more like a surgical process of dealing with legacy applications in a way that realizes quick wins and begins to reduce costs, helping to fund future phases. Usually, it looks something like this:
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Legacy avoidance: The recognition that a firm has slowed down or stopped launching new application systems projects, and instead relies on the data that is in the shared knowledge graph.
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Legacy erosion: Occurs when firms take use cases that were being performed in a legacy system and instead implement them directly on the graph. Rather than wholesale legacy elimination (which is hard), this approach allows the functionality of the legacy system to be gradually decommissioned.
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Legacy replacement: Once enough of the data, functionality, and especially integration points have been shifted to the graph, legacy systems can be replaced. Not with “legacy modernization” systems, but with lightweight standalone use cases on the graph.
Read more: Incremental Stealth Legacy Modernization
ABOUT US
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
PROBLEMS WE SOLVE
Taking a different path STARTS NOW. Become Data-Centric to simplify and enhance your enterprise information landscape:
5 Business Reasons for Implementing a Knowledge Graph Solution
1. Comprehensive data integration
2. Contextualized knowledge discovery
3. Agile knowledge sharing and collaboration
4. Intelligent search and recommendation
5. Future-proof data strategy
Integrating semantic capabilities into enterprise business processes has been the foundational shift that organizations such as Google, Amazon, and countless others have leveraged. The results are tangible: increased market share and revenue, lower costs, better customer experiences, reduced risks, and the promotion of innovation.
Semantic Arts’ professional services deliver true solutions (not gimmicks) for current and future information management challenges.
FROM OUR BLOG
Why are scanners so slow?
Last week over lunch, my 18-year-old son Eli asked me, “Why are scanners so slow? They don’t even have as much to do as a copy machine. The copy machine has to move paper, put ink on the page. The scanner only has to scan.” He was referring to flatbed desktop scanners; we have a...Continue reading→
Location and navigation in computer systems
I’ve been working a lot lately with Semantic Web technologies. In particular I’ve been reflecting on the profound impact of basing everything on URIs. At one level it doesn’t look much different from primary keys or universal ids or GUIDs, but at a number of levels it is quite different. I might talk about that...Continue reading→
Bob DuCharme’s book: Learning SPARQL
I was hoping I wasn’t going to have to learn SPARQL 1.1 from the specs. Bob DuCharme’s book Learning SPARQL 1.1 arrived just in time to save me from that fate. The book is well organized, progresses well and has great examples. What I particularly like and what you don’t get in the specs, are the little...Continue reading→
DIY Software Applications
CIO magazine had an article this month “Why CIOs Still Like Do It Yourself Software Development” and while the article wasn’t terribly compelling I do think it makes what is about to become inevitable, acceptable. We’ve spent the last couple of decades convincing ourselves that application development is hard. Yes there is plenty of evidence, and more than...Continue reading→
The future of software: Ditch the Stack
Most software projects start with an architecture. And most architectures are “stacks” as in “this is what our stack looks like.” This is where middleware, tools, languages and the like get decided. Two interesting things happen here. The first is the “platform wars.” Vendors of middleware and tools are very interested in which stack gets...Continue reading→
Foxconn’s getting 1 million robots
I just saw an article that Foxconn (China’s largest private employer, and manufacturer of among other things the iPhone) has unveiled a plan to install 1 million robots in its assembly plant. (They currently employ 1 million employees) What’s wrong with this picture? What’s wrong is America isn’t implementing a factory with 1 million robots. Does anyone...Continue reading→
Refactoring the Law
Just read an interesting article: Refactoring the Law: Reformulating Legal Ontologies, by Garret Wilson, which was quite interesting. Wilson, presumably a nerd turned lawyer or vice versa, makes the case that the understanding and practice of law have been evolving in that style of punctuated equilibrium that those of us in software development call “refactoring.” That...Continue reading→
Report from the Ontology Summit
Nearly 100 people in the international ontology community met this past April 18-19 at the sixth annual Ontology Summit to discuss “making the case for ontology.” In recent years the number of deployed ontologies has increased dramatically, yet the technology is still very niche and poorly understood outside of the community. The goal of this...Continue reading→
Adding Women to a Group Makes the Group Smarter
There was an article in this month’s Harvard Business Review “What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women” “> The methodology of the study was they measured IQs of individuals and then sometimes randomly and sometimes not so randomly assigned them to groups and then had the groups attempt to complete a task, which was meant...Continue reading→
Zen mind
Part 1 & Part 2 We just conducted a weeklong training session on OWL/DL and Ontology Engineering. Several of the participants will be attending the Semantic Technology Conference, and felt they will be getting a lot more out of the conference, because of the training. On drilling down a bit further, we found that the...Continue reading→
gist: 12.x
gist: is our minimalist upper ontology. It is designed to have the maximum coverage of typical business ontology concepts with the fewest number of primitives and the least amount of ambiguity. Our gist: ontology is free (as in free speech and free beer–it is covered under the Creative Commons 3.0 attribution share-alike license). You can use as you see fit for any purpose, just give us attribution.
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