Semantic modeling or capturing your business semantics is an important step forward from a Business Glossary. It allows you to be more specific by adding more formality and ensuring consistency in your business definitions. In essence, this means that you describe your business terms by relating them to eachother, inserting them into a hierarchy / taxonomy and by adding rules.

Benefits

• Avoids misunderstanding: by providing a clear, accessible and agreed set of terms and definitions as the trusted source, discussions and misunderstandings can easily be resolved, long before theses errors and their corresponding costs, are hard coded in an IT implementation.
• Improves alignment: by extending and relating work from the Business Glossary with added semantics, you are building a tangible bridge between business and IT, as business people can handle their business definitions and information analysts also add and find what they need for their work in IT projects (e.g., Master Data Management, Data Integration, Business Intelligence, ...).
• Improves interoperability: semantic models can serve as a basis in a Model Driven Architecture to support forward engineering. By starting from aligned definitions and business concepts, it is easier, more efficient, less risky and less costly to enable interoperability as compared to digging through application logic, databases, code tables and outdated spreadsheets.

Features

• Wide range of semantic modeling constructs: capture anything ranging from an ordinary term and its definition, to relations, concepts, taxonomy, classification and categorization schemes, mappings, taxonomy, ontology and business rules.
• Variety of imports and exports: start from what you have (UML, XSD, Excel, CSV, SBVR XMI, Word, Powerpoint, PDF, text files, ...) and generate what you need (RDF/OWL, UML, XSD, Excel, CSV, ...).
• Business-friendly representations: some semantic modeling constructs are more difficult to grasp, so our user interface is focused on reducing complexity, and increasing understanding, even for people unfamiliar with semantic technology.
• Evolution support: easy to use versioning with audit trails and rollbacks, coupled with a variety of statistics and suggestions for content improvements.
• API for integration: an easy (web)services API allows for easy integration with other tools (e.g., Content Management Systems, Portals, Modelling tools, ...).
• Roles and workflow: customize the software with your own roles and workflows for validation, approval, rejection, member promotion, ... to make sure that it suits your specific organization and culture.