Welcome to my first posting for T2P's Semantics Core! By way of introduction, this core will focus primarily on clarifying and improving the ways that companies use and apply semantics in technologies that support business processes. 

In general, semantics pertains to the study, representation, or interpretation of meaning.  Conventionally, computer systems have largely been designed to process digital content based on syntax, rather than semantics. However, as information technology and architecture has evolved, it has become increasingly feasible to bring the full power of complete languages to bear on business problems. Complete languages incorporate syntax, vocabulary, and our focus: semantics.

• Syntax – Syntax rules define valid grammatical structures for statements.  XML has emerged as the most common syntax standard for semantic constructs.
• Vocabulary – Vocabulary encompasses valid terms that may be combined into statements.  Many horizontal (e.g. RDF) and vertical (e.g. IFX) standardized vocabularies have emerged.
• Semantics – Semantics defines the meaning of statements.

Semantics are important because they support integration models that operate at the business-event level, allowing applications to leverage standardized views of business events across business units, business processes, and application silos.

Semantically enabled business event models generally include business process maps and associated metrics to provide context for business events. We'll be looking more closely at how this works in my future articles. If you want to be notified when I post something new, just subscribe to the RSS feed for this page