Information and Knowledge Integration in an Enterprise

 Recently I came across an article by Ricardo Falbo, et al. from UFES (Brazil) that identifies various dimensions of information and knowledge integration that I wanted to share.  These are:

 

• Data Integration
• Presentation Integration (enterprise portals and mashups)
• Control Integration (what we often think of as application integration)
• Process Integration (see my earlier blog on this)
• Platform Integration
• Knowledge Integration (emphasizing knowledge capture through rich semantic definitions)

 

The context of the discussion is ODE (Ontology-based Software Development Environment), developed at UFES, but it is quite applicable to the needs of any enterprise and not just Software Engineering.  Also, while most enterprise solutions focus primarily on data integration or application integration, none consider all these in a single composite offering.  In that regard, through the application of semantic technologies (particularly a rich set of ontologies), ODE is one of the first systems that I have seen which demonstrates how one could offer such a complete and seamless integration.  While ODE attempts to do this via a full blown application, I believe that soon we will be able to achieve this level of integration across heterogeneous applications in an enterprise by combining some of the recently evolving technologies, including those related to the semantic web.  An example of one of these was recently mentioned in Bob Zureks' blog   

 

Sanjiva, Orinda, Nov '08.  

Comments

[Kingsley Idehen]

I took a quick look at Expressor product (exposed via the Bob Zurek) link, I noticed that they are offering a Virtual Data Management solution (called MDM nowadays). Anyway, I noticed that like most in the MDM realm, the connection between RDF based Linked Data and MDM hasn't been established.

We are now at a stage where OWL and RDF based Linked Data (in general) deliver very powerful units of data, information, and knowledge integration via URIs that take entity based data access outside the confines of MDM specific solutions.

Please take a look at this presentation when you have a moment:
http://tinyurl.com/568y9g

Kingsley