9/14/2007

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Business is all about relationships: the relationships between one employee and another, organized into a staff hierarchy, and into departments and business units; the relationships between these departments and the internal resources of the company. And let's not forget the relationships between the company and its customers and partners, either as a whole, or increasingly -- in this age of blogs, wikis, and personalized customer experience -- between individuals within the company and their outside correspondents.

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Information is the lifeblood of these relationships, and business have recently been paying more respect to this fact by putting enterprise data architecture (EDA) high on the agenda. But a lot of the EDA mainstream is constructed on technologies designed for managing focused structures of well-organized data, which does not fit very well with the explosion of information relationships in modern business. Most people accept the emergence of basic EDA discipline as a good thing, but some people feel it's time for a new approach that puts rich data relationships at the foundations.

"Semantic technology" is a broad name for the technology that deals with such rich data relationships, and "semantic web" describes the subset of such technology that's built on Web technology.

Semantic web is a very promising technology that has suffered a lack of pragmatic focus. It was born in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in the aftermath of HTML's success, and with XML starting on an impressive trajectory. But it was positioned either as a form of search engine enhancement -- which struggled for relevance against the Google approach of building gigantic indexes -- or as an artificial intelligence system working on the scale of the Web, which set a large barrier to credibility. One area where semantic web technology could show more ready promise is as a component of enterprise data architecture, but there has been precious little discussion and work in this area.

The most important characteristic of semantic web for EDA is that web technology has proven itself as the best glue ever put into practice. One web site might be running an all-Microsoft stack on an Intel Xeon box producing HTML mixed with Silverlight components, while another might be a Sun server running J2EE with Java applets on the client, while a third might be a generic AMD kit with Debian Linux serving up standards-compliant XHTML with SVG. Regardless of the very different characteristics of the back-end applications, these all work together with the sort of seamlessness that leaves IT green with envy. Enterprise systems integrators and ERP vendors have been minting money for a decade turning two application silos into two and a half, while the web has been showing how integration can really work.

The key is in creating data models that reflect the language and personality of the business. This is different from the ERP convention of trying to reengineer the business's processes and characteristics to match the vendor's software models.

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