We have witnessed over the years the progression from basic machine languages, to higher-level procedural languages, and then to object-oriented languages. Each advance introduced dramatic improvements in software capabilities that resulted in major leaps forward in fulfilling information technology requirements. We are again on the verge of another major advance in the evolution of software technology that may bring great value to organizations and other information technology beneficiaries.

With the Web 2.0, ontologies are being used to improve search capabilities and make inferences for improved human or computer reasoning. By relating terms in an ontology, the user doesn’t need to know the exact term actually stored in the document. Data Rationalization is a Managed Meta Data Environment (MME) enabled application which creates/extends an ontology for a domain into the structured data world, based on model objects stored in various models (of varying levels of detail, across model files and modeling tools) and other meta data.

Master Data Management is now mainstream and those of us who have practiced it for a few years are battered, bruised and wearily displaying our scars. Typically defined as the people, processes and systems that govern the core data (e.g. products, customers, suppliers) needed to run a business, Master Data Management (or MDM) requires painstaking work in three broad areas: data standardization, architecture, and governance:

A little over a year ago, the Tribune Company launched its Topic Galleries, http://chicagotribune.com/topic, the result of semantic technologies used, in great part, to generate a product.  Other Tribune products are “spinning off” the vocabularies and the underlying logic intelligently surfacing the content in the Galleries.  However, to date, the Topic Galleries provide the most comprehensive presentation of a discovery process intended, in part, to plumb the depths of Tribune content well beyond the limited topic coverag