Some may wonder why the Semantics Core focuses on business processes. Why not data management, content management, or service-oriented architecture (SOA)? For sure, semantics applies to a broad range of topics, but business processes hold special significance due to their focus on customers and their direct impact on business operations. By taking an end-to-end perspective that crosses department boundaries, business processes provide a powerful integration mechanism aligned with business strategy and customer requirements.

The goal of a business process is to produce deliverables for customers in a manner consistent with the business objectives and strategy of the enterprise. Customers may be internal or external to the enterprise but internal customers must have defined relationships with processes that produce customer deliverables. By spanning departmental boundaries, business processes bring an enterprise focus to departmental activities and resources. An enterprise focus necessarily includes suppliers, partners, customers and regulators. Business processes integrate and coordinate the enterprise with these external parties.

In my first post, I explained why we need better semantics. Now, let's take a brief look at synergies and dependencies between semantics and business processes...

Semantics – Semantics is often defined as the study of meaning expressed in languages. As noted in the first Semantics Core posting, however, semantics is an element of language, i.e. languages are required to study semantics but semantics is a necessary component of any language. Escaping this circular reality requires meta-languages to create and evaluate languages.

Loglan was developed by the Loglan Institute, Inc. to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which asserts that the structure of language imposes limits on how people think, how they communicate, and even how cultures develop. Loglan is often regarded as a language but I see it as a meta-language since one of its design goals is to support machine translation between natural languages that have evolved somewhat haphazardly over long periods of time, typically many centuries.

Loglan design goals illustrate potentially desirable characteristics of languages that may facilitate improved semantic expressiveness:

• Metaphysically parsimonious – Loglan is defined with a minimal number of required concepts.
• Logically powerful – Loglan grammar is based on predicate logic.
• Syntactically unambiguous – Loglan syntax is precise.
• Culturally neutral – Loglan is independent of particular cultures.

IT systems are now tasked with and increasingly capable of providing semantic integration services. In contrast, integration and data exchange in traditional IT systems is based on syntax. Semantic integration requires new machine-readable languages offering different degrees and types of semantic expressiveness.

My future posts will explore some of these languages and their connection to business processes. Subscribe to this Core's RSS feed to receive instant notifications of updates.