While at the Open Group's Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Austin, Texas I spoke with Ron Schuldt, Chair of the Open Group UDEF (Universal Data Element Framework).
There was actually considerable interest in semantic integration in the panel discussion I participated in. I found this actually very encouraging. I think there is too little attention paid to this aspect of distributed systems integration and SOA. The truth is that resolving the differences in terms that have the same name and mean different things, and terms that are named differently but actually refer to the same business entity can consume a large proportion of the project budget and time. Graphically mapping tools require humans to understand the information in both systems and then draw the line between them. Providing a way to automatically enable systems to exchange information without first having the manually resolve the semantic differences will provide a huge leap in productivity and rapid deployment of new solutions. In short, semantic integration is a very important topic.
In October 2006 the Open group ratified UDEF as a standard. It is based on other standards, and contains 18 universal properties, such as "Amount". As Ron Schuldt said, until everyone globally agrees that "amount" is a dollar figure, B2B commerce will be stymied. UDEF also contains 17 objects universally agreed upon, including enterprise, product, process. The UDEF definitions are available online.
To hear my interview with Ron Schuldt and learn more about UDEF click here.
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