Vocabulary Management

Many organizations have recently begun to take an interest in developing artifacts, such as controlled vocabularies, glossaries, data dictionaries, and taxonomies, to help them create a common understanding of the meaning of the concepts they use throughout their business. This is a vital process that needs to be undertaken to gain seamless interoperability of information systems and business processes across an organization. If people are using the same words to mean different things or different words to mean the same thing, communication between people and software breaks down. However, none of the methods mentioned above are practical for reaching this objective. They each either lack formal semantics (i.e. taxonomies) or else are not machine-readable (i.e. controlled vocabularies, glossaries). Semantic technologies offer a way for organizations to formally capture the meaning of the concepts that are relevant to their business in machine-readable models called ontologies.

Revelytix's MatchIT can be used to automatically extract an ontology from a set of schemas. Knoodl.com can then be used to collaboratively build and manage those or other RDF/OWL ontologies in the form of vocabularies. Vocabularies in Knoodl are a combination of a formal ontology and unstructured wikitext. The wikitext portion of the tool enables business people and domain experts to contribute their vital knowledge to the development and evolution of the vocabulary. Knoodl has a role-based permissions model that enables communities to institute a governance model around their vocabulary development process. Vocabularies can be imported and exported as OWL files. All these capabilities are vital to successfully creating, managing, and using your ontologies to facilitate a common understanding of the semantics of your domain.