Business Metadata: Capturing Enterprise Knowledge

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If an authorized vocabulary is desired, then there must be some gover-

nance to apply the “authorized” status. However, as we stated earlier, one of

the objectives of knowledge capture is to encourage businesspeople to share;

too much governance will accomplish the opposite and cause them to NOT

share. In this case, it seems suitable for knowledge capture projects to apply

reactive, not proactive, governance—governance after the fact. Essentially you

are telling the users, “Give me what you’ve got, and I’ll figure out what it

means later.” This is exactly opposite from how constraints work in the transac-

tion world, where errors cannot be ...