I read with interest a quote from @lorita (Lorita Ba) who was live Tweeting yesterday from Gartner’s Business Intelligence Summit. Quoting Research VP Mark Beyer, one of Lorita’s Tweet read:
“Beyer: Info Capabilities Framework needs semantic interpreter that tells you “one” is the same thing as 1. Built out of metadata.”
I have to admit when I first heard the term I was skeptical, I thought another term that will divide content and data into another silo, but I was intrigued by the term semantic interpreter and thought how close that term relates to an old staple, Roget’s Thesaurus. One of Merriam-Webster’s two thesaurus definitions reads:
A thesaurus is list of subject headings or descriptors usually with a cross-reference system for use in the organization of a collection of documents for reference and retrieval.
So the theorist in me says this “system” already exists, so what is new and different from the classic meaning of an online thesaurus? One has to dig deeper into Mr. Beyer’s research to uncover the intricacies of his “semantic interpreter” functionality. I believe the basis for this “new” interpreter is directly tied to Mark’s research around a functionality for a “Logical Data Warehouse.” Mark describes this as a vendor (silo) agnostic data layer that is made up of 6 parts:
- repositories
- data virtualization
- distributed processes
- active auditing and optimization
- service level negotiation
- ontological and taxonomic metadata
Mark goes on to define its benefits as a way to consolidate and share information assets across enterprise applications, as opposed to the traditional way of storing data and information in vendor related silos.
With the average numbers of IT providers at the average Fortune 500 company at an all time high, my skepticism turned around and I saw Mark’s Semantic Interpreter not as another silo, but as a much needed way to embed metrics, unite, report and visualize data across disparate silos and as a way to increase and automatically measure business process efficiency and effectiveness across disparate enterprise applications.
