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TopQuadrant Monthly Column

Every month we will feature an in-depth column from the experts at TopQuadrant explaining the application of semantic technologies within the context of enterprise computing.

Bringing together Systems Engineering and the Semantic Web

Systems Engineering (SE) is a vast discipline that includes many sub-disciplines. The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) defines Systems Engineering as:
“<..> an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems. It focuses on defining customer needs and required functionality early in the development cycle, documenting requirements, then proceeding with design synthesis and system validation while considering the complete problem: 

Building Competency in Semantic Web Technology – Part II

In the final installment of this two-part series, Dean Allemang and Scott Henninger look into how the insights about semantic web education have an impact on the adoption of semantic web technologies.

Building Competency in Semantic Web Technology

In part I of this two-part series, Dean Allemang & Scott Henninger draw on years of teaching TopQuadrant’s introduction course on the Semantic Web to make some observations on teaching Semantic Web concepts to a wide variety of students.

Creating Dynamic Business Applications using Semantic Web Technology – Part II

This is the second of a two-part series discussing how Semantic Web Technology can enable Dynamic Business Applications in the enterprise. Read Part 1 of the article here.

Empowering New Roles and the Future Role of IT

Creating Dynamic Business Applications using Semantic Web Technology – Part I

Does your organization find that it can develop a new product faster than your IT group can create a new application to manage it?  Are your existing systems too inflexible?

No, these are not just the opening lines of a sales pitch aimed at selling you the latest IT package or platform. They reflect critical business drivers and challenges.

oeGOV: Open Government through Semantic Web Technologies

Enabling Data Independence for Government Transparency
by Ralph Hodgson, CTO, TopQuadrant, Inc.
Open Government has become a popular theme, both in the U.S. and other countries.  With “Transparency” gaining momentum, increasing categories and amounts of government data are becoming available on the web.  In the U.S., an impetus for this was Barrack Obama’s memorandum to the heads of Executive Departments and Agencies. This included the following statement:

The Semantic Web: A Key Enabler to Enterprise Vocabulary Management – TopQuadrant

Controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and thesauri have been in use in a wide variety of organizations for decades. With the information explosion fueled by the internet, the importance of these organization structures has become more and more apparent. The problem isn’t where to find vocabularies or how to build them; on the contrary, enterprises typically find that they have several mini-vocabularies, each tuned to a special purpose or business need, just as so-called “folksonomies” have appeared in popular websites.

Using Semantic Web Technology to create an active Enterprise Architecture – TopQuadrant

Enterprise Architecture (EA) captures “what is happening” in the enterprise: how the enterprise’s activities, processes, capabilities, systems and components, information resources and technologies relate to the enterprise’s missions, goals and measurement system. The objective of EA is to be able to understand the relationships between these elements — analyze and continuously adjust them to align with business strategy, improve effectiveness and quality of service. This is an important goal critical in today’s enterprises where business functions are inseparable from the technologies supporting them. However, the implementation of EA typically falls very short of the goal.