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, people believe that the real world is complex and messy and that our information systems bring order out of chaos. However, the opposite is true. The real world tends to be much simpler than how we represent it in our database and applications schemas. For example, take a stapler. Our purchasing system refers to it as an item with a price; our manufacturing system breaks it down into an itemized list of plastic and metal and our administrative system keeps track of how many of them are on the shelf above the printer. However, in the real world it is just a thing that shoots a bit of metal through sheets of paper to fasten them together. Since semantic technology defines things separately from the applications or databases, you only have to do it once. In traditional IT systems, each thing is redefined within the context of what the information system is tracking, thereby creating multiple references about a single thing.