Semantic Meta Data for Enterprise Information Integration

Abstract

The challenges for today's enterprise information integration systems are well understood. In order to manage and use information effectively within the enterprise, three barriers that increase the complexity of managing information have to be overcome: the diverse formats of content, the disparate nature of content and the need to derive "intelligence" from this content. Current software tools that look at structuring content by leveraging syntactic search and even syntactic meta data are not sufficient to handle these problems. What is needed is actionable information from disparate sources that reveals non-obvious insights and allows timely decisions to be made. A new concept known as semantic meta data is paving the way to finally realize the full value of information. Indeed, Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the next generation of the Web is termed the "semantic Web," where semantic meta data plays the pivotal role. By annotating or enhancing documents with semantic meta data, software programs can automatically understand the full context and meaning of each document and can make correct decisions about who can use the documents and how these documents should be used. This article looks at how semantic meta data is created and used within the enterprise.