Principia: Power from Simplicity

As I suggested in a previous post, I think the future of CM (and most especially SCM) lies substantially with the semantic web. My reasoning is simple; CM is about information management and this information needs to be shared, controlled and updated across increasingly more diverse organisations and systems. To provide this facility we need a lingua franca, a common means to control and consolidate information between disparate sources. The semantic web provides the means to achieve this information management and exchange.

The great advantage of semantic web over efforts such as the now defunct Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) is that it requires no agreement between vendors (beyond using semantic web technology). The weakness of efforts such as ALF is always that they demand buy-in from the main tool vendors. A substantial number need to agree to develop and support the new standard.

Certainly semantic web is no panacea, but at least if Vendor A chooses one semantic representation of CM information and Vendor B chooses another they can still communicate by creating a correspondence rule set between the two representations (a little like XSLT can transform one XML into another — only a little though, semantic web has much more to offer).

So vendors need to agree to use and provide semantic web representations for CM information? No, not really. Most tools provide APIs that would allow this information to be interpreted from, or added to, any existing tool. Certainly a non-trivial effort, but one that is at least feasible. Better still, if multiple implementations are created for any tool these can again be consolidated using semantic web techniques.

The real power of semantic web technology comes from two sources; the abstraction of information semantics, and the ability to draw inferences from this information. Once you have an ontology, some inference rules and semantic relationships between ontologies, your inference rules will work across ontologies — neat. What does all the gobbledy-gook mean? It means that if Vendor A develops an ontology with a set of inference rules (rules for extracting more information from the underlying information) then Vendor B can map their ontology onto Vendor A’s and use Vendor A’s inference rules too. Actually it’s even better. User X can extend the rules and have them apply to Vendor A and/or Vendor B’s information sets equally, even if the original inference rules were designed for only Vendor A.

Brilliant. Problem solved then? Sadly, no. Although this all offers promise of a way forward there remains a lot of work to establish these semantic descriptions and, as many have discovered before, agreeing on the precise meaning of each semantic element is nontrivial in its own right. Not that this should stop us attempting the task.