Business Semantics Management
Business Semantics Management does for information what Business Process Management does for processes.
In recent years, much attention went to the process side of IT: SOA, BPM, etc. While the process side is very important to achieve the necessary flexibility and insight, the foundation for all these initiatives is still the data. This foundation however has not received the attention it needs. To really deliver on the promises that are made by BPM and SOA initiatives, companies will need a new and better way to manage their information assets.
Organizations are increasingly being tasked to achieve greater levels of productivity, agility and simply make the organization more effective. A key factor in achieving this goal is to make the information assets as clear as possible. Instead of having hundredths of legacy information silos that are hardly understood by IT, let alone by business. It is crucial that all stakeholders really understand where the information resides, what it looks like, what it means, in other words, the semantics of these information assets. Collibra is convinced that in order to achieve this goal, organization must strive to the semantic alignment of their operational systems and the business / social level of the organization. What that means is that the information assets of the organization should be clear to all stakeholders, be it business or It. These information assets should not only be well defined and understood to form a kind of advanced documentation. However, this kind of documentation should also be leveraged operationally to make, integrate and maintain new and existing computer systems more easily. Through this kind of direct link, this documentation will always remain up-to-date. Collibra has developed unique technology to create, maintain and use this kind of documentation: Business Semantics Management. It is the how of our Semantic Alignment vision. Collibra's Business Semantic Management technology enables all stakeholders (IT and Business) to understand all information assets and leverage them for operational efficiency.
The power of controlled natural language
Instead of burdening the user with complex schema's and impossible to understand constraints, Collibra has developed a unique technology that provides all the necessary power through extremely simple, natural language-based, modeling technique. The basis of Collibra's approach is an elementary fact type. An elementary fact type consists of 2 terms with a role and co-role relating both terms.
Three-layered architecture for scalability and sustainability
To make this scalable and sustainable over time, Collibra's Business Semantics Management technology adopts a three-layered approach:
- Lexon Base: A flat repository of elementary fact types grouped by context.
- Pattern Base: A conceptual pattern is a selection of elementary fact types that model a certain problem domain. Ontologies are created through collaboration as they represent the shared agreement over a set of information concepts by a specific user group or community. Patterns are also versioned to support evolution.
- Commitment Layer: A Commitment is a (composite) pattern with application-specific mappings to existing information sources. Application-specific constraints are added to the ontology that represent the constraints of the underlying information sources (eg. Relational tables, xml files, unstructured content, ...). A commitment empowers users to operationally leverage the semantics from the ontologies.
The following figure shows a screenshot of the Collibra Studio, a model and manage environment for business semantics.
