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Industry Knowledge Graph™ Case Study Written by Michael Atkin In 1978 the owner of the New England Patriots made a famous commercial after his wife gave him a Remmington electric razor – “I liked the razor so much, I bought the company.”  In the case of the Industry Building Blocks (IBB), Semantic Arts liked the content … Read more

gistBFO: An Open-Source, BFO Compatible Version of gist  Dylan ABNEY a,1, Katherine STUDZINSKI a, Giacomo DE COLLE b,c,  Finn WILSON b,c, Federico DONATO b,c, and John BEVERLEY b,c aSemantic Arts, Inc.  bUniversity at Buffalo  cNational Center for Ontological Research  ORCiD ID: Dylan Abney https://orcid.org/0009-0005-4832-2900, Katherine Studzinski  https://orcid.org/0009-0001-3933-0643, Giacomo De Colle https://orcid.org/0000- 0002-3600-6506, Finn Wilson https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7282-0836, … Read more

Client 360 – A Foundational Challenge When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, CROs, CFOs and chief compliance officers were stuck  pouring through annual reports and frantically searching within corporate documents to  determine Lehman’s actual corporate structure – including who was bankrupt, who funded  whom, who guaranteed what, and who would hold the obligations when everything … Read more

Attribution 4.0 International Creative Commons Corporation (“Creative Commons”) is not a law firm and does not provide legal services or legal advice. Distribution of Creative Commons public licensesdoes not create a lawyer-client or other relationship. Creative Commons makes its licenses and related information available on an “as-is” basis. Creative Commons gives nowarranties regarding its licenses, … Read more

Semantic Arts’Secret Sauce An organization founded by an individual or small group is deeply shaped by the priorities and capabilities of its founder(s), as well as the market and industry it enters. The baseline requirement for any startup is to identify and meet the needs of specific types of customer or clients to sustain and … Read more

Semantic Arts Enters Its’ 25th Year According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 15,336 companies were founded in Colorado in the year 2000. By 2024, only 2,101 of those companies remained. While we can speculate endlessly about why just ~14% survived recessions, pandemics, and international conflicts, the impression is clear. The organizations that endured… … Read more

Financial Services Regulatory Issue Brief  Leading analysts all share a similar view about global financial regulatory priorities. Complexity will  continue to increase with geopolitical events and regulatory fragmentation on the rise. The global economic environment will remain a key concern. There will be a push toward harmonized enforcement from financial crime and sanctions from war. And … Read more

Semantic Arts, Inc. Celebrates its 25th Anniversary Pioneering Data-Centric Transformations to Modernize IT Architecture, Advance Knowledge Systems, and Enable Foundational AI CONTACT INFO: Dave McComb Phone: (970) 490-2224 Email: [email protected] Website: https://www.semanticarts.com/ Fort Collins, Colorado – August 14, 2025: According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 15,336 companies were founded in Colorado in the … Read more

Building an Ontology with LLMs We implement Enterprise Knowledge Graphs for our clients. One of the key skills in doing so is ontology modeling. One might think that with the onslaught of ChatGPT and the resulting death knell of professional services, we’d be worried. We’re not. We are using LLMs in our practice, and we … Read more

The year of the Knowledge Graph (2025) There are a lot of signals converging on this being the year of the Knowledge Graph.   Before we get too carried away with this prognosis, let’s review some of the previous candidates for year of the Knowledge Graph, and see why they didn’t work out.   2001  Clearly the … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

Chemical Manufacturer: Faceted Taxonomies  Capturing interrelations of information for relevance can be difficult, even with NLP. More often companies will seek to work in taxonomy space in their journey toward richer implementations of knowledge graphs for automation adoption. Our consulting services leveraged this approach to provide a foundation stepping stone as the company sought to … Read more

Morgan Stanley: Data-Centric Journey  Morgan Stanley has been on the semantic/ data-centric journey with us for about 6 years.  Their approach is the adoption of an RDF graph and the development of a semantic knowledge base to help answer domain-specific questions, formulate classification recommendations and deliver quality search to their internal users. Their primary objective … Read more

Investment Bank Case Study: Operational Risk  In this major investment bank managing all the flavors of operational risk has become very balkanized. There are separate systems for process management, risk identification,  controls, vendor risks, cyber risks, outsourced risks, fraud, internal incidents, external incidents, business continuity, disaster recovery inter-affiliate risk and many more.  To address, we … Read more

Investment Bank: Resolution Planning  This is one of the “too big to fail” banks, who are required by regulators to implement  “resolution planning” or as it’s known on the street a “living will.” The first few generations of the resolution plan were long on long textual descriptions of the nature of the interactions between various … Read more

Management Consulting: Enterprise Search  This major consulting firm has the enviable problem of having every possible desirable expertise characteristic’s somewhere within their ranks of 300,000 employees, and the unenviable problem of trying to find those needles in such a gigantic haystack.  It’s not that they are unaware of the problem. They have launched many projects … Read more

LexisNexis: Enterprise Ontology  We worked with this leading provider of legal and medical knowledge to build an enterprise  ontology for their wide-ranging content. In addition to building an ontology for their case law and statutory product lines, we worked with their Master Data Management Initiatives.   They have over 30 MDMs in various stages of development … Read more

With a successful 200-year track record in developing extensive and diverse product lines by leveraging chemistry and science, this global innovator was embarking on a new era of discovery to shape a better world.  Categorization of products and the relationships between those named entities were difficult to describe in traditional taxonomies and “systems of systems”. … Read more

Semantic Arts worked with PwC to improve Verizon’s data privacy capabilities.  Prior to the engagement, as applications evolved many of the process steps required to stay in compliance with privacy regulations and policies were performed manually using  multiple data sources. Our goal was to provide a knowledge graph as a single source of privacy metadata … Read more

International Monetary Fund The IMF works to achieve sustainable growth for its approximately 200 member countries.  It carries out missions and loans funds to execute projects for the member countries. The countries’ financial situation is measured and tracked using a wide variety of economic indicators.  The challenge: Information is stored in a wide variety of … Read more

World Minerals: ERP Conversion Feasibility   World Minerals is the largest producer of diatomaceous earth and a major producer of several other industrial materials. The infrastructure upon which their internally developed ERP system  was based had become obsolete. This included pretty much the whole stack: DEC VAX operating system, Alpha chips, the Rdb database, Cobol and … Read more

Washington State: SOA Design  The long-range plan at L&I called for organizing their future application initiatives around shared services and shared messages on a message bus.  In this project we created detailed requirements specs for the dozen major shared services and created an inventory of the key messages they would need to form the backbone … Read more

Washington State: Secretary of State  We were engaged to perform a feasibility and requirements study for the Corporations and  Charities Division of the Office of the Secretary of State. In our proposal we included  developing a semantic model to help clarify the feasibility and requirements. Another key part of the requirements was to examine some … Read more

Washington State: Entity Identification We were retained to help with this two-pronged project. One prong was to create a feasibility study to determine whether collecting additional data from employers would aid  in targeting workplace safety inspections.  The other half of the project was to do a high-level redesign and feasibility study on how  they were … Read more

Washington State: Enterprise Ontology The Employment Security Division (ESD) manages Unemployment Insurance and Claims and have a very active program to help people get back to work. We were engaged to help them determine a strategy for integrating into what had become three major systems all geared toward getting out-of-work workers back to work.  One … Read more

Investment Bank Case Study: Records and Retention Management This major investment bank was found in contempt of court and massively fined for their incoherent approach to records and retention management. Up to this point the prevailing approach had been to allow data stewards to tag documents and systems with record classification information to aid in … Read more

Investment Bank: Data Meaning Have you ever read an analyst’s report? They are full of strange turns of phrase. The phrase “we continue to overweight [stock x]” is not a reference to obesity or a lack of a weight watcher program, it means they like this stock. “… will continue to face headwinds”  is not … Read more

International Monetary Fund  The IMF works to achieve sustainable growth for its approximately 200 member countries.  It carries out missions and loans funds to execute projects for the member countries. The countries’ financial situation is measured and tracked using a wide variety of economic indicators.  The challenge: Information is stored in a wide variety of … Read more

Dun & Bradstreet  Dun & Bradstreet sell data about company’s credit worthiness and their contact information. Every dataset and every API is its own “product” complete with its own metadata. With this approach for managing information comes excessive complexity. They did a massive analytic project to inventory all the elements that were part of at … Read more

Chemical and Science Manufacturer  Capturing interrelations of information for relevance can be difficult, even with NLP. More often companies will seek to work in taxonomy space in their journey toward richer implementations of knowledge graphs for automation adoption. Our consulting services leveraged this approach to provide a foundation stepping stone as the company sought to … Read more

Major Credit Card Processor  In their migration to the cloud, this Credit Card Processor turned full-service bank, decided to tackle the problem that many large firms face – achieving an integrated view of their customer.  We helped them define, semantically, what characteristics made someone a customer. It turned out that each part of the business … Read more

Colorado Child Support Enforcement  We have done a series of projects with Colorado Child Support Enforcement to help them understand, at a high level, how their future systems might look when they are partitioned,  when they incorporate an SOA architecture and when they conform to a common semantic model.  We are currently working with COCSE … Read more

Schneider-Electric Product Catalog  Schneider-Electric employs 160,000 employees in 140 countries. They make over 1 million industrial scale electric devices. We were retained to help them get more value out of their  product catalog. We built a high-level version of their enterprise ontology to make sure the   work on the catalog would fit in with other … Read more

S&P Platts: Data Aggregation  The commodity world has its own way of carving the world into manageable regions. We are accustomed to thinking that counties are in states, states in countries and countries in continents. Even that has its exceptions. In the world of commodities (natural gas versus sugar beets, versus solar power), this is … Read more

Management Consulting: Privacy  Every firm has a privacy problem. The advent of regulations such as GDPR and CCPA are bringing this to the forefront.  Our client has a great reputation for helping their clients with these issues on an advisory basis, but they believe there is a much bigger play in building the starting point … Read more

Harvard Pilgrim: Canonical Modeling Harvard Pilgrim is a major healthcare insurance company in New England. We had done some training and high-level design with them. When they began designing their SOA  messages, they asked us to help them select tools to enable this. We prepared requirements unique to their situation, scouted for and found all … Read more

Sentara Healthcare: Enterprise Ontology Sentara Healthcare is an integrated healthcare organization, including hospitals, clinics,  home health, assisted living and health insurance. They employ 23,000 people, primarily in  Southern Virginia. We worked with them to build what we believe to be the first integrated ontology for healthcare delivery.  After building the ontology we worked with them … Read more

Washington Department of Labor: Web Services One of the shared services we designed in the Department of Labor & Industries’ long-term  plan was “Web Facing Services.” When it was time to implement this, they asked us to help them define the requirements and select a software product on which to base the service.  Our original … Read more

Washington Department of Labor: Security The Department of Labor & Industries, like most organizations, has implemented security separately for each of its applications. The more applications you get, the more  redundancy is introduced, and the more likely it is that you are inconsistently applying the  law and your own internal policy.  We began this project … Read more

Washington Department of Labor: Referral Tracking  We were retained by the Washington Department of Labor & Industries to determine if it  was feasible to design and build an “Enterprise Referral Tracking System.” One of the first challenges was to figure out what constituted a referral. After a few straw man definitions and a lot of … Read more

S&P Platts: Identity Resolution  If you turn on the news and hear that Brent Crude is trading at $19 a barrel (did it really get to $19 dollars? Yes, it did, we’re living in strange times), it’s very likely that it was Platts that determined this price. Platts are in the “price assessment” business. If … Read more

Proctor & Gamble  Research & Development  Procter & Gamble have over 10,000 people working in Research & Development. They believe that innovations in one part of the organization might offer inspiration to researchers in another part but communicating that is a challenge. The main challenge is that these researchers are in a great many domains, … Read more

S&P Global Commodity Insights (formerly known as Platts) provides benchmark price assessments for the physical commodities markets. As we have noted before, if you hear  on the news that Brent Crude is trading at $100 a barrel, it’s likely that S&P Global  determined this price.  The price of a given commodity – be it coal, … Read more

On a previous project we worked with Sallie Mae to build an enterprise ontology for their loan business. After the ontology was complete, they decided to outsource a new line of loans to a third-party SaaS vendor. Shortly after making that decision, they realized that the new system would have completely different screens, and completely … Read more

Broadridge: Legacy Understanding This firm processes some 70% of all the back office of Wall Street. They have three major systems, for different types of financial instruments and jurisdictions. The three systems are barely integrated. Bringing a client up on any of their systems is a multiyear endeavor.  Getting combined reporting from these three systems … Read more

Teacher Retirement System: Enterprise Architecture The Teacher Retirement Systems is one of the largest pension funds in the country, with 1  million active teachers and 250,000 retirees. They run the organization on a series of aging mainframe systems. In the late 90s, they attempted a major upgrade to their technology, but finally had to abandon … Read more

Investment Bank Risk and Controls We worked with a large investment bank who are embarking on a series of projects to further automate their back office. One of their first tasks was to understand in greater detail what all the 5,000 people in the back office were doing. They built an “Economic Architecture” that was … Read more

Investment Bank: Economic Architecture We worked with a large investment bank who are embarking on a series of projects to further automate their back office. One of their first tasks was to understand in greater detail what all the 5,000 people in the back office were doing. They built an “Economic  Architecture” that was essentially … Read more

Washington State: SOA Design and Ontology  In our initial engagement, we did a rapid but detailed review of 200 applications, interfaces,  current initiatives, long-range plan, and a new system being proposed. We found several  areas where they could leverage work in progress to speed up their new project initiative,  and several areas where, with a … Read more