Business Metadata: Capturing Enterprise Knowledge

Chapter 11 Semantics and Business Metadata

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Expressing relationships can get very tricky: There is a continuum of rich-

ness, as depicted in the Semantic Spectrum. Taxonomies offer broad term/

narrow term expression, which provides a basic, rudimentary hierarchical rela-

tionship. However, many things don’t fit neatly into hierarchies, so a more flex-

ible relationship structure is needed. Humans can grasp C-maps, and depicting

concept relationships in a network model may be helpful to businesspeople.

The Semantic Spectrum illustrates the need for the richness of expres-

sion that moving upwards in the spectrum provides. However, the tools we ...