Data Warehousing and Semantics: How Do They Play?

Rapidly emerging from the froth, business semantics is showing some bonafide potential. The application of sematic technology, such as the semantic web and ontology, is being woven into the fabric of computing and even data management. But so far, data warehousing seems to be oblivious to its potential.

A number of factors will cause that to change very rapidly. Enterprise Information Integration (EII) technology is maturing, causing the data warehouse's primacy to come into question. The biggest drawback of EII is its weak metadata component, which could be dramatically upgraded with semantics. But don't weep for the warehouse yet, the need for stable, integrated, historical data will be greater than ever when the current monolithic enterprise apps are reconfigured as smaller chunks of services, increasing the need for the services provided by a data warehouse. Whether this ultimately ends up as a persistent repository (a data warehouse) or a virtual or hybrid structures is too early too tell. What business semantics ofers over our current amalgam of metadata schemes is greater depth, consistency and, above all, the ability for machines to draw inferences from the metadata. This last ability is central to embedding analytics in composite applications.

In this session, you will learn how Business Semantics are already playing a role in the traditional territory of data warehosuing and what to expect in the coming 12-24 months.