Business Semantics: from business definitions to operational integration

Business Semantics from business deﬁnitions to operational integration Stijn Christiaens stijn@collibra.com Wednesday 25 November 2009

“Some theories hold that they may have been a way of communicating with others, while other theories ascribe them a religious or ceremonial purpose.” Cederberg, South Africa Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_drawing

All good things come in threes ‣ Symbol symbolizes Concept. ‣ Symbol stands for Object. ‣ Concept refers to Object. Source: http://users.bestweb.net/~sowa/peirce/ontometa.htm

A second one ...

A second one ... Car

... and a third Mortgage Risk Exposure

... and a third Mortgage ??? Risk Exposure

... and a third ??? Mortgage ??? Risk Exposure

Humpty Dumpty’s advice "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I From “Through the choose it to mean - Looking Glass”, neither more nor less." Ch. VI by Lewis Carroll, drawing by Sir John Tenniel

What is the color of this dot? Social test courtesy of Prof. Dr. Robert Meersman

... but for whom? “Red”

An ontology ‣ Ontology = speciﬁcation of a conceptualization [Gruber, 93] ‣ More precise: ‣ Formal ‣ Computer-Based ‣ Linguistic Approximation of a ‣ Shared Conceptualization

Closed vs. Open Systems ‣ Closed = developed within, and for, 1 organisation ‣ Example: a database and its end-user applications ‣ Requirements and functionality known and specific ‣ Data models agreed locally, refer to organisation’s concepts ‣ Can combine by integration ‣ Open = developed for deployment on internet ‣ Domain-specific, not application-specific ‣ Users, usage context, applications largely unknown a priori ‣ Ontologies refer to language- and context independent concepts ‣ Must combine by interoperation

Ontology ≠ data model ‣ Ontologies are… ‣ a priori shared, yet developed autonomously ‣ independent of application purpose, yet often obtained from speciﬁc contexts in domain ‣ language independent, yet engineered using (natural) language ‣ Translates into difﬁcult new requirements… ‣ standardization, openness, extensibility ‣ scalability of design and implementation

A brief history of semantics ‣ From philosophy - e.g., Aristotle’s syllogisms: All mortals die. All men are mortals. All men die. ‣ ( ... a lot in between ... ) ‣ To computer science - e.g., SQL: SELECT person.dateOfDeath FROM person WHERE person.type = “mortal” AND person.sex = “male”

There is a lot Courtesy of Mills Davis (Project10X)

Cyc Cyc is an artiﬁcial intelligence project that attempts to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base of everyday common sense knowledge, with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform human-like reasoning. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

Cyc (in facts & ﬁgures) ‣ Started in 1984 by Doug Lenat. ‣ Name comes from the stressed syllable of 'encyclopedia'. ‣ 70 million dollars and 700 person-years of work, ‣ 600,000 concepts, deﬁned by 2,000,000 axioms, organized in 6,000 microtheories, ‣ But not enough applications to support continued research. ‣ In 2004, the Cyc project was scaled back, and more emphasis was placed on developing applications. Source: John F. Sowa (1 September 2009)

Wikipedia "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language" Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

Wikipedia (in facts & figures) ‣ Created in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and run by non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation. ‣ More than 14,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages ‣ There are 11,062,835 registered users, including 1,702 administrators, while employing fewer than 35 people. ‣ Net loss of 49,000 editors in first 3 months of 2009 versus loss of 4,900 editors in first 3 months of 2008... (WSJ, 23 November 2009) Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About

Freedom ... Evolution evolving from IBM Watson Research 1 December 3, 2001: initial version. July 13, 2002: from controversial 2 to commonly accepted in 2 hours. October 1, 2002: debut of biology 3 grad student at Harvard, good for a total of 79 edits over 3 years. August 9, 2004: black line indicates 4 deletion as vandalism (half of all vandalisms are corrected within 5 minutes). March 29, 2005: longest point, discussion to reduce to neutral 5 point of view September 19, 2005: edit war, with rollbacks rollbacked several 6 times

... versus control Courtesy of Prof. Dr. Martin Hepp

... versus control back to reality: ﬁrst test after X years when business reality already changed ! stop the clock ! big design upfront X years implementation Courtesy of Prof. Dr. Martin Hepp

The ﬁrst known library of its kind to gather a serious collection of books from beyond its country's borders, the Library at Alexandria was charged with collecting all the world's knowledge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

One track in history: W3C ‣ A web of documents ‣ Decentralized ‣ The “eyeball” web ‣ Web 2.0 ‣ Saved by the search engine

Enough?

Wrong Gates to the Web?

What would Google do?

2.0 does help

Tim to the rescue The Semantic Web is an evolving development of the World Wide Web in which the meaning (semantics) of information and services on the web is deﬁned, making it possible for the web to "understand" and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

A very basic data model Property Type Resource Value p r v Reads as (left to right): r has a property p with a value v

... some principles ‣ Anyone can say Anything about Any topic (AAA) ‣ Open World Assumption (OWA) ‣ Non Unique Naming Assumption (NUNA) acronyms kindly borrowed from Paul Hermans’ (ProXML) course (recommended)

... with pie Also see: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/RDFnot.html! Source: T. Berners-Lee, “Semantic Web - XML2000”, 2000, http://www.w3.org/2000/Talks/1206-xml2k-tbl/slide10-0.html

Onion model ‣ increasing complexity ‣ wide variety of dialects ‣ no computational ‣ query language (SPARQL) guarantee ‣ available ontologies ‣ reasoning and triple stores

Good Relations ‣ e-Commerce ontology by ‣ adopted by search engines Prof. Dr. Martin Hepp (RDFa, RDF/XML) ‣ embedding in web pages ‣ structured data as the new SEO?* ‣ easy intro ‣ more at http://purl.org/goodrelations/ * Dries Buytaert at http://buytaert.net/structured-data-is-the-new-search-engine-optimization

.0 Courtesy of Nova Spivack

Sampler of others foaf

Wolfram Alpha

New name Courtesy of Sir Tim Berners-Lee ‣ data.gov (US) ‣ gov2.net.au (AU) ‣ data.gov.uk (UK) ‣ .be? (decreet gegevensverkeer)

Direction

Source: http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/

Man versus machine? “All semantic systems should focus on the human origin of the knowledge and its relationships to human needs and goals.” John F. Sowa

Structure ﬁrst ... Image generated through study

... versus content ﬁrst Image generated through Wordle

Source: http://bureauofcommunication.com/

SBVR A.1 Positioning of SBVR in Model-Driven Architecture Another track: OMG SBVR is positioned to be entirely within the business model layer of the OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA)1. ‣ Semantics of Business This positioning has two implications. ‣ OMG Standard and part • SBVR is targeted at business rules and business vocabularies, their MDA effort Vocabulary andbusiness models also have toof developed,those relevant for usage in conjunction Rules including those rules. Other aspects of be including business process and organi structure, but these are to be addressed by the OMG in other initiatives. ‣ Business models, including the models that SBVR supports, describe businesses and not... IT systems that su • Business modeling ‣ UML, MOF, XMI, the them. In MDA, IT systems are specified using Platform Independent Models (PIMs) and Platform-Specific Models (PSMs).

Some details ‣ Is specified in itself, specific and complete ‣ Aligned with variety of systems: ISO Common Logic, RDF/ OWL, topic maps, various vocabulary specifications, ... ‣ Caters for existing content: country and name codes (ISO/ IEC 3166), dates and times (ISO/IEC 8601), addresses (ISO/ IEC 11180), ... ‣ Incorporates community aspects: essential for defining semantics and management thereof

A nutshell of a nutshell 11.1 Business Meaning 11.1.1 Communities, Meanings & Vocabularies Semantic communities are people that have a body of shared meanings (i.e., they share the same concepts). Semantic communities are divided in speech communities, that use certain language to refer to these concepts (i.e., they share the same symbols). Speech communities manage their set of vocabularies. A vocabulary consists of vocabulary entries (i.e., the symbols). Figure 11.1

Vague is not necessarily bad “Human knowledge is a process of approximation. In the focus of experience, there is comparative clarity. But the discrimination of this clarity leads into the penumbral background. There are always questions left over. The problem is to discriminate exactly what we know vaguely.” Alfred North Whitehead

But sometimes it can hurt "People sometimes make errors," said Dr. Edward Weiler, NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science. "The problem here was not the error, it was the failure of NASA's systems engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes to detect the error. That's why we lost the spacecraft." The peer review preliminary ﬁndings indicate that one team used English units (e.g., inches, feet and pounds) while the other used metric units for a key spacecraft operation. This information was critical to the maneuvers required to place the spacecraft in the proper Mars orbit. From: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=2937

Other semantic systems ‣ XBRL, UN/CEFACT Core Components, ISO Common Logic, ISO 20022, ebXML, ... ‣ Various industry standards: HR-XML, FpML, papiNet, eEG7, Accord, CERIF, ... at least one per industry ‣ Most efforts today are situated in area of UML, XML schema and of course all time favorites Excel, Word and Visio

Which one? “The proliferation of incompatible semantic systems is a scandal that is strangling the growth of the entire ﬁeld. The oldest legacy systems can interoperate more easily than two modern systems based on different logics or ontologies.” John F. Sowa

World View Information is today’s currency Information is meaningful data Context data meaningful

Semantic gaps Lack of context leads to semantic conﬂicts meaning meaning meaning data Semantic gaps are costly, risky and reduce agility They lead to miscommunication and IT failure

Business Context Business communities, IT demand side "Person in Country Belgium "Person that buys our products that bough a product last year" with a certain frequency" Manage the business context "Customer" CRM DATABASE MAINFRAME Technical communities, IT supply side

It’s more complex than “Red”... “Customer” ‣ An individual or an organisation, or neither? Could an individual be a customer himself, a member of a family, and also represent a larger organisation? Would this situation involve two separate customers? ‣ Is anyone who has purchased anything a customer? Is there a minimum order amount? ‣ If someone has placed an order but the transaction has not completed yet, is the party placing the order considered a customer? ‣ What if the party purchased something from you over ten years ago; are they still considered a customer? Customer example taken from the book “Business Metadata” by William Inmon, Bonnie O’Neil and Lowell Fryman

... a little more ... “Mortgage Risk Exposure” ‣ intra day, end of day, end of week, ...? ‣ at 99, at 99.9, ...? ‣ on portfolio, on single security, ...? ‣ on level 1, 2, 3, ...? ‣ over 30 days, 90 days, 120 days, ...?

... there are more colors...

... there are more colors... ‣ customer, product, subscription, interest rate, mortgage, order, delivery, student, delivery, department, payment, oil well, patient, treatment, partner, reel, account, article, invoice, address, employee, salary, service, process, birth, shipment, driver, revenue, item, party, study area, grant, funding programme, contract, ... ‣ ... a few thousand for large organisations (Bachman, 1989)

... they are everywhere...

... deep in your systems ...

... many of your systems ... Enterpris Product e Data DB Warehou se Another Custom Product er DB DB ESB Data Warehou ... se General Trading Ledger Another ... ESB

... and well hidden. “Reel”

Business Semantics Management Give context to your key business assets Semantic Data Integration Business Metadata IT Projects Business Solutions ‣ EAI / SOA ‣ Business glossary & analysis ‣ Metadata ‣ Governance & compliance ‣ BI ‣ Knowledge Management ‣ Data integration ‣ Business-IT alignment

Business Semantics Give context to your key business assets ‣ Business Semantics Management deﬁnes the contextual meaning of key business assets for your organization by adding business facts and rules, to deﬁne the business context. ‣ Key business assets: customer, product, subscription, interest rate, mortgage

Business Semantics Management ‣ Business Semantics Glossary lets you collaboratively deﬁne and govern the meaning of your business assets in their business context and automatically generate new technical models (XML, UML, RDF/OWL, ...). ‣ Business Semantics Studio ties meaningful business context to your technical models and (legacy) data sources. ‣ Business Semantics Enabler automatically generates data translation and validation services (eg. database to xml, xml to database, xml to xml, web-services, ...) on top of your existing infrastructure

Product Suite Business Semantics Management product suite Metadata Levels Business / Social Conceptual Business Vocabulary Business Semantics Glossary Business Facts Business Rules Relational Business Semantics Studio Technical Models: Techical UML, XML, ER, ... Business Semantics Enabler Operational Technical / Executable Data Services Operational

Product Process Products Full-cycle Business Semantics Management Business / Social Business Intelligence XSD UML (Technical) Metadata Management Operational Technical / Data Integration, Middleware, EAI, SOA

Product Process Products Full-cycle Business Semantics Management Business / Social Business Vocabulary, Facts, Rules (SBVR) Glossary Business Business context Business context ... Intelligence XSD UML (Technical) Metadata Management Operational Technical / Data Integration, Middleware, EAI, SOA

Product Process Products Full-cycle Business Semantics Management Business / Social Business Vocabulary, Facts, Rules (SBVR) Glossary Business Business context Business context ... Intelligence Studio XSD UML (Technical) Metadata Management Operational Technical / Enabler Data Integration, Middleware, EAI, SOA

Business Semantics Glossary

Business Semantics Studio

Business Semantics Enabler Business Semantics Glossary Business Semantics Studio Stock ERP Mngmt xml 1 Enabler ESB Middleware

Business Semantics Enabler Business Semantics Glossary Business Semantics Studio Stock Car Movement “5” did not specify a ERP Mngmt Car Group. Enabler xml 1 ESB Middleware

Business Semantics Enabler Business Semantics Glossary Business Semantics Studio Stock ERP Mngmt Enabler ESB Middleware

Business Semantics Enabler Business Semantics Glossary Business Semantics Studio Stock Car Movement “120” assigns more ERP Mngmt than one Rental Car. Enabler xml 1 ESB Middleware

Business Semantics Enabler Business Semantics Glossary Business Semantics Studio Rental Car “XSV829” cannot be assigned Stock to Car Movement specifying Car Group ERP Mngmt “Monovolume”. Enabler xml 3 ESB Middleware

Architectural evolution Monster Application

Architectural evolution Application 1 Application 2 Data Model Data DBMS

Architectural evolution Presentation Tier Presentation 1 Presentation 2 Business Logic Tier Business Logic 1 Business Logic 2 Data Tier Data Model Data DBMS

Architectural evolution Presentation Layer Present. 1 Present. 2 Present. 3 BPM layer BP BP BP Web Service Layer BL BL BL BL BL BL BL Data Layer Data Model Data Model Data Data DBMS DBMS

Architectural evolution Presentation Layer Present. 1 Present. 2 Present. 3 BPM layer BP BP BP Web Service Layer BL BL BL BL BL BL BL Semantic Data Services DS DS DS DS Real world Semantics Physical Data Storage Data Model Data Data Data DBMS Legacy Unstructured

Information Infrastructure

Information Infrastructure “An information-centric infrastructure is the alignment of metadata, standards, content formats and applications to support consistent and seamless enterprise wide information capture, persistence, transformation and delivery”. Gartner, Inc.

Agile Methodology Semantic Reconciliation Semantic Application Scope Create Reﬁne Articulate Unify Select Commit ‣ Two processes: ‣ Semantic Reconciliation ‣ Semantic Application ‣ Processes iterate independently: Scalability through feedback loop ‣ Closed-loop transparency, alignment and governance

Key points ‣ There is three of them: symbol, concept and object ‣ Ontology ≠ data model ‣ Large scale, head on is risky ‣ Collaboration is essential ‣ Semantic systems come in dozens (but not necessarily interoperable...)

Questions? • • more buzz on www.collibra.com more research on starlab.vub.ac.be ‣ P. De Leenheer, S. Christiaens, and R. Meersman (2009) Business Semantics Management: a Case Study for Competency-centric HRM. In Journal of Computers in Industry: Special Issue about Semantic Web Computing in Industry. Elsevier. ‣ P. De Leenheer and S. Christiaens (2008) Challenges and Opportunities for More Meaningful and Sustainable Internet Systems. In Proc. of Future of the Internet Symposium 2008 (Vienna, Austria), LNCS, Springer ‣ M. Hepp. (2007) Possible ontologies: How reality constrains the development of relevant ontologies. IEEE Internet Computing, 11(1):90– 96 ‣ R. Meersman (1999) The use of lexicons and other computer-linguistic tools in semantics, design and cooperation of database systems. In Proc.of CODAS99, pp. 1–14 ‣ P. Spyns, Y. Tang, and R. Meersman (2008) A model theory inspired ontology engineering methodology. Applied Ontology, 4, 2008 ‣ OMG SBVR Speciﬁcation (2008) http://www.omg.org/spec/SBVR/1.0/

http://inside.collibra.com	901
http://www.slideshare.net	3
http://www.collibra.com	1
http://www.lmodules.com	1
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	1
http://www.linkedin.com	1

Business Semantics: from business definitions to operational integration

by Collibra

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

6 Embeds 908

Statistics

Business Semantics: from business definitions to operational integration Presentation Transcript