Adaptive Information Improving Business Through Semantic Interoperability, Grid Computing, and Enterprise Integration

Chapter 1. Semantic Interoperability Gives IT Meaning

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Semantic interoperability is an enterprise capability derived from the application of special technologies that infer, relate, interpret, and classify the implicit meanings of digital content, which in turn drive business processes, enterprise knowledge, business rules, and enterprise application interoperability.

• The third wave indicates that competitive advantage for companies in all industries will be largely driven by efficiency in information sharing.

• Most strategic, long-term barriers to efficient information sharing are inadequately addressed by currently popular integration approaches.

Innovation in information technology (IT) is often represented as a series of waves. Going back to the 1950s, various technology waves appear with large amplitudes. These waves include the mainframe, the network, the mini-computer, the personal computer, and the Internet. Then there are technology waves with smaller amplitudes—the disk drive, the computer terminal, the relational database, the graphical user interface, the laser printer, markup languages, and component software.

Viewing technical innovation in this manner is useful, but its simplicity often obscures much of the real story. Rarely does just one technology make for a revolution. More often it is a combination of technologies that create a new platform that then creates fertile ground for an even larger set of innovations. Often, these technologies are not even new. ...