The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,300 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
The Business Semantics Glossary is set up and empty. 35 students from both VU University as the University of Amsterdam are teamed up to compete for building the best glossary and make use of it for the most original semantic application.
Applying the Business Semantics Management methodology, they have to assign roles (stewards, admins, stakeholders) and tasks in the brand new workflow system (see the resp. menu in the screenshot).
Industrial analysts like Gartner and thought leaders all around agree that information should be treated as a reliable asset that drives many operational and strategic decisions. Along this line, information governance is an emerging business strategy attempting to regain competitive advantage from earlier investments in data management technologies. In a recent survey, IBM found that 65% of companies from various sectors across the USA – are eager to roll out information governance even before the next business year ends. The question however remains.
What is information governance about and how exactly should we implement it?
Is there a one-size-fits-all approach as claimed by many software vendors, or does every organization require a unique plan?
At the VU University in Amsterdam, Ramon sistermans and me are looking to find an empirical answer to these questions. Through a survey we can identify information governance needs at different layers of the company and find out how technology vendors can gear their products towards meeting these needs.
To all data professionals worldwide, please help us enlighten the dark concept of Information Governance by filling out our survey:
The full article is now published in the professional monthly magazine Informatie. See my earlier blog post for a translation of the summary in English. The work is not done though: we are further crowd sourcing the information space using Linked Data approaches based on semantic standards managed in Collibra’s Business Semantics Glossary. Hence, to be continued, again :-)
I truly believe in co-creation. For example, we have our Collibra software and methods regularly scrutinized by numerous master students from both technical as well as more business-oriented computer science programmes in universities across Europe.
At VU University, for example, in the context of my Business Semantics Management master class, 21 MSc students playing the role of steward formed the Amsterdam Service Modelling Community with one common purpose: building an SBVR version of the USDL service description language. There were two additional members invited playing the role of observer: Carlos Pedrinaci (representing the USDL W3C incubator group) and Ivan Razo-Zapata (our PhD student at VU working on dynamic service market place composition). Finally there was me playing the role of administrator, making a total of 24 members.
The Amsterdam Service Modelling community has 24 members (21 playing the role of "steward"; 2 as "observer"; 1 as "administrator") and is subdivided in 5 speech communities. (Note: this is an older release of the Business Semantics Glossary software)
The figure below depicts the Business Semantics Management (BSM) methodology that is established by two operational cycles (reconciliation and application) each grouping a number of modeling activities. For a summary go here and for more details see my dissertation.
Business semantics management is established by two operational cycles each grouping a number of modeling activities.
The experiment extended over a total period of 4 weeks; hence we limited ourselves to the first 4 steps of semantic reconciliation only: scope, create, refine, articulate. In September we plan to repeat this experiment over a period of 8 weeks where we will have time to do one full cycle of BSM. Later I will also blog about similar experiments we conduct at VUB University of Brussels.
The Amsterdam Service Modelling Community (ASMC) is modelled (in SBVR) as a semantic community. SBVR takes into account the existence of multiple perspectives on how to represent concepts (by means of vocabularies).
Within the ASMC community, the 21 students grouped in 5 speech communities each focusing on a specific part of the USDL framework. In SBVR, speech communities are part of one semantic community and each manage their own set of vocabularies to refer to this body of shared meanings. This allows for different representations of the same business concepts.
The navigator shows (from left to right) the structure of communities and their vocabularies.
The module-based decomposition of USDL depicted below makes it easy for teams to scope. However, they all had to start from the Service and Pricing module so we could observe divergence in definitions as well, an important step in the ontology evolution process (see the Perspective Rendering principle of my PhD on BSM).
The module-based USDL framework allows for clear scoping among speech communities (by courtesy of http://www.internet-of-services.com/).
Create, Refine, Articulate
Below is a screenshot of the term “Service” in the Pricing and Participant vocabulary in development by the “VAAF” speech community team. The steward (indicated on the top-right) “Vlant” is responsible for selecting the right stakeholders (bottom-right) among his fellow members and engage them into the reconciliation of the term.
A term can be defined using different kinds of attributes, going from (business-oriented) descriptions and definitions to more (formal) fact types and business rules. Currently the level of articulation is below threshold (37.5%) incentivizing the steward and stakeholders to elaborate more.
Term "Service" in the Pricing and Participant vocabulary in development by the "VAAF" speech community team.
Next time we will talk about vocabulary statistics and workflows in the software. Workflows practically implement the orchestration of reconciliation tasks to members according to their roles and responsibilities.
Mass connectivity between customers and suppliers on the Web transforms business from a transaction-based (or product-oriented) practice to a long-term relationship-based (or service-oriented) practice.
An example. Before we bought a car as a product: once the transaction (Car for money) was made, the car becomes your possession and you are responsible to take care of all services (like tax and insurance) you need to get the car on the road. Value was created at the point of transaction. Today, like with leasing, a car becomes never really you property: you rather consider it as a service that enables you to “move around freely”. Value is created of a much longer time: as long as you use the “car service” you evaluate the added value and feed back to the supplier so it can be improved.
When implementing technologies to support service-based market places, we must take into account economic relationships rather than work flow properties; and rethink the whole concept of value to start with. Indeed the business model of these new market places are centered around the notion of value; hence it is relevant to semantically codify “who is offering what of value to whom” and what is expected of value in return. Where before value was a simple “price”, it now includes a lot of dimensions (fed by social Web data like reputation, ratings, etc.) along the life cycle of a service. Another problem is that most interesting needs, those along the long tail, can usually not be immediately served because (i) no single supplier offers it by default; and (ii) as it is too niche, multiple suppliers have to assess ROI first and co-create accordingly.
Needs in the head (red part) of the tail are usually offered by vertically integrated service providers. Needs in the long tail are typically more complex requiring niche offerings offered by a combination of suppliers (picture by Bart Van De Casteel) .
Determining needs and offerings is not a one-pass exercise. To match them up they have to grow towards each other through compromise and sacrifice of all parties. Therefore, we propose an interactive dialogue system to express customer needs based on marketing theory (see e.g. Philip Kotler and Kevin Keller. Marketing Management. Prentice Hall, 2006). In addition, we also provide capabilities to publish service offerings by means of an ontology-based catalog. Moreover, since mass configuration of products is playing an important role, dynamic composition of SVNs has been also supported. Finally, our long-term ultimate goal is to automatically compose a SVN, including the required business processes and Information Technology (IT) support in the form of web services. Such IT is then aligned with the business, since both are designed in an integrated way.
Razo-Zapata, I.; De Leenheer, P.; Gordijn, J.; Akkermans, H. (2011) Service Value Networks for Competency-driven Educational Services: a Case Study. In Proceedings of the 6th international Workshop on Business / IT alignment and Interoperability (CAiSE 2011), Springer LNBIP
Prosperity in a knowledge-based economy will benefit from a well-oiled innovation engine. With the advent of the Web, companies and research institutions have come to realize that they can no longer rely on their own research to innovate. Open innovation is a new practice in which stakeholders trade ideas and results for the benefit of themselves and others; a digital information market place for innovation may then naturally emerge.
The Department of Economy, Science and Innovation (EWI) of the Flemish government has taken the lead at European Open innovation to drive through Flanders Research Information Space (FRIS, that is “fresh” in Dutch), an ambitious change program that makes data on innovation-related core entities ranging from institutions , researchers, and projects to patents publicly available by means of semantic standards governance (Collibra, EuroCRIS) and service-oriented technology (Atira).
FRIS basic services: a mesh-up of core entities Project, Organisations, and People on a geographical map
Ultimately, this technology forms a generative basis for a digital information marketplace for innovation. To trade information services, one should first determine what information should be included, and what roles are involved in its assembly.
Snapshot of the Collibra Business Semantics Glossary
In this article we discuss the role of business semantics for describing innovation-related core entities. We further illustrate how the business semantics, can be used to capture the life (and assembly) of core entities. Finally, we give a future perspective on FRIS as a digital information market place for innovation in the broader context of the Semantic Web, today better known as Linked Data Web.
The article is now being published in the professional magazine “Informatie” and will soon be available in English too. As a sneak preview: next figure shows a screenshot of the term ”Project” (within the ”Project” vocabulary of “CERIF” speech community that is part of the ”FRIS” semantic community) in Business Semantics Glossary that implements the SBVR standard. The software is currently deployed at EWI for managing business semantics of CERIF terms underlying the future market place.
A term (here ”Project”) can be defined using one or more attributes such as definitions, examples, fact types, rule sets, categorisation schemas (partly shown in taxonomy), and finally milestones for the lifecycle. ”Project” is a subtype of the ”Thing” and has two subtypes: ”large academic project” and ”small industrial project”.
Re governance: in the top-right corner is indicated which member in the community (here “Pieter De Leenheer”) carries the role of “steward”, who is ultimately responsible for this term. The status ”candidate” indicates that the term is not yet fully articulated: in this case “Project” only 37.5%. This percentage is automatically calculated based on the articulation tasks that have to be performed according to the business semantics management methodology. Tasks are related to defining attributes and are distributed among stakeholders and orchestrated using workflows.
To be continued.
Antoniou, G.; Grobelnik, M.; Simperl, E.; Parsia,B.; Plexousakis, D.; De Leenheer, P.; Pan, J. The Semantic Web: Research and Applications: Proceedings of the 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2011, Heraklion, Crete, LNCS 6643
The Proceedings are now available in print and online.
I am invited to talk at DAMA International Conference 2011, in London, UK, November 2011. The yearly conference organised by DAMA, the premier organisation of data management professionals worldwide. The conference programme is not public yet, but I post here already the abstract for my talk.
Clear and uniform business definitions are an essential starting point for information governance. However, many tools applied for managing them still operate on the mere technical metadata level. Yet, to empower business-driven information governance, technical metadata should be seeking grounding in business semantics that are agreed on by subject matter experts. They define a richer contextual meaning of key business assets for your organization in terms of business vocabularies and rules.
Walking through business cases in technology, finance and government, attendees will learn that:
- Business semantics in OMG SVBR is structured in such a way that it provide a shared understanding on rules and policies regarding information assets, as well as a technical specification that can be applied in the technical infrastructure.
- Feedback from their application in data integration, provide deep insights into the quality of business semantics and information.
- Agreeing on and total quality assurance of business semantics requires a collaborative and iterative approach, involving relevant subject matter experts from both business and IT.
- In this collaborative effort, workflows practically implement the orchestration of tasks to stakeholders according to their roles and responsibilities.
In the talk I will give an overview of different technologies, but special attention goes to Collibra’s Business Semantics Glossary, a collaborative business semantics management tool adopting SBVR. Recently Collibra’s technology was recently praised by Gartner as Cool Vendor in Enterprise Information Management 2011. Earlier, Collibra was listed as one of 16 semantic technology companies to watch by PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Technology Forecast in Spring 2009.
