Semantics & Governance

Someone asked me recently whether or not there some type of tangible relationship between Semantic Integration and governance - it was an excellent question and the answer is a resounding "Yes."

Let's approach this at each of the levels where it applies:

Level 1 - Understanding the Nature of Governance at a Conceptual Level

Level 2 - Using Governance as an enterprise process medium

Level 3 - Using Governance as a foundation for detailed policy management (at the technical level)

While much of the current dialog in IT has focused on SOA Governance, IT or Enterprise Governance has a much wider scope than Services Oriented Architecture. And of course all of this extends into business areas or domains that go beyond IT. One of the great things about Semantic Integration is that at its heart it is not limited to Information Technology per se, Semantics provide the foundation for Every aspect of an organization, not just its IT capabilities.

So let's return to level 1 - our first problem is that most organizations don't currently agree on what Governance is. As evidenced by our discussion thusfar, Governance can be directed at many specific areas or be viewed holistically across them all. Semantic Integration helps us determine the core definitions and relationships in this conceptual competition - at the heart of all Governance definitions lies the need to conduct "Oversight." The corollary to that is the ability to engage in active remediation of issues discovered within the scope of oversight. These are both 'management' activities.

Our next post will explore level 1 Governance in more detail...


Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.

Semantic Integration - The SI of Tomorrow

Currently when people use the acronym “SI” they tend to refer to something known as ‘Systems Integration’ or specifically to ‘Systems Integrators.’ However, the nature of what a 'system' is and how that concept is evolving are going to change the way that we look at this particular term in the relatively near future. I predict that within the next ten years, ‘SI’ in the context of information systems technology will primarily refer ‘Semantic Integration.’

The Evolution of Systems Integration

What I mean when I say that Systems Integration and the notion of Systems are evolving is that new design concepts and technologies are having a radical and disruptive influence on current integration practices, processes and design approaches. What was a ‘system’ under distributed computing environments is now undergoing a transformation – taking on aspects of both the distributed model used today and centralized models from yester-year. This is largely coming about due to the advent of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology and design principles. It is important to note here that SOA, like Semantics, is a practice area based upon design philosophies and technical standards – the tools being developed in relation to those philosophies standards or applied to it are not the drivers for these trends. Folks who focus on the software tools only and not the underlying principles tend to run into many difficulties in implementing these types of new capability.

Our previous or current experience with System of Systems architectures is what led to the need for System Integration and Integrators largely as an afterthought or mitigating action in response to the need for rapid deployment of multiple, new distributed technologies. Most enterprises have spent the last twenty years playing catch-up in this environment and few are truly architected in any comprehensive sense of the term. System Integration is often a tactical activity – ensuring data passes between systems silos, connecting various applications point-to-point or through limited middleware capabilities, deploying portals and unified sign-on and security management and so forth. Piece by piece, an enterprise becomes more unified under this type of scenario, but at a cost – that cost is increased complexity and expense for maintaining non-standard integration.

The future is upon us; that future is just now promising something new – the ability to coordinate architectures across tiers, across federated domains and across all related lifecycles. The new enterprise can be viewed as a single organic system, consisting of dozens or hundreds of services that operate as a single unified yet dynamic entity that is often federated across geographic and logical domain or boundaries and orchestrated at runtime. This is SOA but it is more than SOA, because SOA doesn’t yet have the necessary philosophical framework for exploitation of Semantics to help achieve this enterprise unification. That’s where Semantic Integration comes into the picture.

What is Semantic Integration ?

Semantic integration is not is not confined to or restricted to the ability to operate or configure or utilize specific semantic technology or software packages. Semantic Integration represents a specialized field of practice dedicated to using Semantic Design Principles, Methodologies and technology as a facilitating mechanism (often alongside SOA) to help solve enterprise-level problems for IT. SI as a practice area is relatively new (it is only now being defined), it is much more than the “Semantic Web” yet is obviously built upon the capabilities inherent within the emerging set of Semantic standards that can be used to express and ultimately visualize semantic entities, RDF, OWL and so forth).

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.

A Conceptual Framework for Semantic Integration

Let’s take a moment to elaborate on the core premise. What we’re really looking for is a mechanism that can tie together the ever-growing spectrum of specialized information, tools and techniques that we are forced to deal with in a typical enterprise today. The natural trend has pushing away from unified management or control over this environment and we have been playing catch-up for years as we attempt to impose order over enterprise entropy.

This situation applies equally to the development as well as the production environment. The fact is that no single control mechanism has yet been successful at tying together either environment (or both). And as we well know, complexity costs us big – in money, in time and in failure to meet expectations. SOA held promise in that it in contained control elements for both development and production. We are extending this to the next logical step – comprehensive control or at least direction over everything.

But ‘control’ is a frightening term for many, it may imply micromanagement which we know from experience doesn’t work too well in environments where change rules supreme. We don’t wish to stifle innovation or slow down the pace of change – any attempt to do so would surely lead to failure. What we need to do is understand or set the parameters of our known universe, to consciously design it in advance at a high level and guide all of its constituent elements along an evolutionary path that falls with those defined parameters. This could be viewed as ‘loose conformance’ rather than strict compliance.

Our enterprise universe is no longer restricted to any one organization, so the framework for accomplishing this definition must be a shared endeavor. This doesn’t necessarily imply technical standards; technical standards must all be subordinated to the true control mechanism – Semantics. Semantics allows us for the first time to design for scenarios where 100’s or 1000’s of applications share the same type of data and deconflict both their functions and information output.

The conflict between what appears to be redundant functionality and competing data elements is the most serious and complex challenge in every enterprise today. Many solutions have tried to address this by tracking metadata across the enterprise or by imposing governance rules – however both of those attempts still lack the most important key to success – the overall context in which all of the data and rules will operate – across not one but all potential enterprises. Semantic Integration will provide this context.

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.