In today’s dynamic business environment, enterprises are feeling a tension between the desire to have a single, centralized, master vocabulary system and the current reality that vocabularies are managed in a disconnected, distributed manner. The most common storage choice for business vocabularies is spreadsheets, trapped and hidden on user desktops. In addition, some enterprise systems include their own vocabulary capabilities, but use of them simply results in a proliferation of disconnected vocabularies, subverting the value of a controlled vocabulary in the first place. (see sidebar - Challenges)
This tension has driven many organizations toward an Enterprise Vocabulary Management
solution, where controlled vocabulary is an integral part of
enterprise-level information management. Beyond focusing on particular capabilities of vocabulary tools, Enterprise Vocabulary Management focuses on the modularity and connectivity of vocabulary assets.
Enterprise Vocabulary Management Solutions built with TopBraid Suite
TopBraid Suite is an integrated, complete lifecycle semantic application development product suite that allows users to design, assemble, deploy, and collaborate within a new generation of dynamic business applications. Building on the capabilities and benefits that come from Semantic Web standards, it provides out-of-the-box support for the following Five Key Capabilities of an Enterprise Vocabulary Management solution. With these capabilities, TopBraid Suite provides flexible, customizable solutions for managing taxonomies and business vocabularies in support of content delivery, search, navigation, data integration and disambiguation:
- Vocabulary Processing: Standard hierarchical, associative and equivalency relationships; repositioning and numbering of terms; crosswalk mapping and graph capabilities.
- Automatic processing: Ability to create validation rules and automated script processing via SPIN and SPARQLMotion.
- Import/Export: Import/Export from RDBMS, RDF Store, SPARQL endpoints, spreadsheets (CSV), XML, RDF and OWL.
- Collaborative Vocabulary Lifecycle Management:
- Workflow Management: Ability to create
custom, flexible review, approval and publishing workflows.
- Change Management: Extensive record-keeping on every change made in the system.
- Impact Analysis: Ability to query and create longitudinal analysis on any aspect of the vocabularies.
- Merging: RDF standard universal identifiers provide easy “hooks” for merging vocabularies.
- Systems Integration: Integrate with existing enterprise or vocabulary management systems via API.
TopQuadrant’s Enterprise Vocabulary Management Solution (EVMS) enables simplified development and management of controlled vocabularies. Through a customizable interface, business stakeholders are able to collaborate on defining and connecting the vocabularies within the enterprise, thus enabling information integration, customization and findability.
Solution Context and Requirements
For years, vocabulary management has been a tangential aspect of the information infrastructure of an organization. Everyone knew that it would be valuable to agree on terms for common concepts in an organization’s business, but somehow it just didn’t seem important enough (for many organizations) to support a concerted effort.
One of the reasons for this is based on a common misconception about information – that there could be a single, correct point of view on data that everyone must share in order to exchange information. The success of the web has taught us that managing different points of view is essential to the long-term success of any distributed system. And a vocabulary is no exception.
Vocabulary Management is becoming increasingly important in today’s enterprises. Enterprises use explicit enterprise vocabularies to:
- Enhance the ‘findability’ of data and information assets
- Improve search through the use of thesauruses and term disambiguation
- Manage a variety of business taxonomies deployed as: portal and web site navigation, web services directories, organization structures for content repositories and other enterprise applications
- Communicate and integrate data across the supply chain
- For example, map terminology across process/organizational boundaries – for data aggregation, transformation and interoperability
- Standardize publication of company product information to external partners and customers.
- Manage business data and metadata – across repositories, applications and data stores
Benefits and Features of building an EVMS with TopBraid Suite
TopQuadrant’s EVMS allows customers to build and integrate common vocabularies, taxonomies and relationships between key business entities through tools based on native Semantic Web representation. At its foundation lie key capabilities of the TopBraid Suite platform:
- Open Architecture and Standards: External data need not be transformed into a tool-proprietary schema. TQ EVMS offers native support for RDF, OWL and SPARQL.
- Enterprise-ready: Scalable and robust architecture with DBMS deployment (choice of databases including Oracle and SQL Server). LDAP integration for access control.
- Flexibility: Multiple visual and text-based interfaces for creating vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri or ontologies.
- Support for Multiple Data Sources: Connections to traditional data sources for import/export, including XML, relational databases, RSS feeds, spreadsheets, microformats as well as multiple RDF stores.
- Customizability: Flexible content layout structure enables multiple customized user interfaces that can meet the needs of each user group.
- Reporting: Advanced query-building tools and reporting through graphical interfaces (visual programming environment). [possible screenshot, example of piping through sparqlmotion.]
Key Features
- Custom numbering and ordering within taxonomies
- Multiple categories for a single term
- Limitless user defined relationships and attributes
- Support for standard vocabularies such as SKOS
- Customizable data entry forms and rules
- Role-based access control
- Collaborative Lifecycle Management through
configurable workflows and stringent change management record
keeping
- Ability to compare differences between multiple
versions of vocabularies
- Ability to selectively rollback changes to
vocabularies
- Mapping of terms from different vocabularies
- Mash-ups of vocabularies from different data sources based on business logic
- In-line data cleansing through processing modules for validation and format checking
- Import, create, validate and export through one streamlined process.
- Simple lookup as well as advanced search
- Creation of new data views on vocabularies based on business logic
- Web-based User Interface customizable on the fly
- Web services communication with other applications
Benefits of Semantic Web Technology Capabilities for Vocabulary Management
Enterprise Vocabulary Management has emerged as an essential facet in effective business information management. While creating centralized reference vocabulary and taxonomy repositories is one common approach, often the governance model is complex and unsustainable. To support the business needs of complex, distributed enterprises, Enterprise Vocabulary Management practices and enabling technology/tools are evolving from Reference-only (text, models) to Interoperable (standards based) to Executable (federated, model-based, semantic-enabled). Semantic web technology makes it easier to aggregate and analyze vocabularies through its capabilities for expressing, querying and federating information.
Commitment to the Semantic Web standards as the basis of the enterprise information infrastructure brings the following benefits:
- The Semantic Web standards Resource Description Format (RDF) and RDF Schema provide the infrastructure for creating a web of information, whether on the public internet or within enterprise intranets. Like the familiar World Wide Web, the Semantic Web is easily extensible, breaking out of information silos once and for all, as vocabularies are available as resources on the web for anyone to reference and use. Each vocabulary element has a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) which uniquely identifies it as a web resource.
- The Semantic Web standard Simple Knowledge
Organization System (SKOS) provides an extensible language for
describing structured terminology systems like taxonomies and
thesauri. Based on RDF, it inherits the power of flexibility and
distribution. SKOS extends RDF with specific notions of linkage
between structured vocabularies, making it particularly useful
for enterprise vocabulary management.
- The Semantic Web standard query language SPARQL provides much more than a query facility. In the context
of SPARQLMotion and SPIN, it provides a powerful mechanism for
modeling complex relationships between terminology. Connections
that previously had to be accomplished with custom software can
now be described in a standard, declarative way.
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