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 new and unique from every other concept, causing redundancy and confusion....Continue reading→

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, which greatly simplifies the system. Another way semantic technology reduces complexity...Continue reading→

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 first it didn’t even have a name it just solved...Continue reading→

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 you create a new table and put new attributes on it you’ve created...Continue reading→

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 each other they are...Continue reading→

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 commonalities across business processes, which serves to greatly simplify the enterprise architecture. semantic arts_schemaGenerally,...Continue reading→

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 applying information systems technology to improving healthcare delivery, Sentara engaged Semantic Arts to build the...Continue reading→

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 organize this vast body of unstructured information into a definitional model that could be used to...Continue reading→

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 Village.” I don’t remember a lot of the specifics of it, although I do remember...Continue reading→

I’m guessing that many of you puzzle over the same thing I do: “Why do large IT projects cost so much?”As we now know, it’s not the development costs (the development is done) nor the licensing costs (typically a small portion of the total cost). There are many other factors, but the one that I...Continue reading→