The Semantic Era of Information Systems

Most of what we had thought were the hard problems of computer science and business system development have been solved. We know how to write efficient algorithms. We know the most effective ways to process and store data. We've solved the problems of getting diverse computer platforms to interoperate. We routinely store terabytes (trillions of bytes) of data in data warehouses. The average home has more processing power at its disposal than the largest corporation of just a generation ago. We've connected nearly a billion devices to a single gigantic Internet.

What we're left with, and what I believe will occupy us for most of the next decade or two, are some problems that don't lend themselves to quite as mechanical a resolution. We have to determine what systems we really want to build. We have to find a way to determine what parts of a system need to be made flexible for future change, and which are likely to be stable for a long time. We need a way to understand the systems we already have, before we attempt to change them. We need a way to communicate with trading partners without a long burn-in period. And above all else we need a way that computers can help us with some of the processes that up until now we have thought of as being in the exclusive realm of the human: interpretation, negotiation, and reasoning.

Scratch the surface on any of these issues and you're into semantics. Indeed, for many of these problems, once the semantic issues are resolved, the remaining technical problems are routine. No period of time is exclusively focused on one issue, but there are periods of time when certain issues rise to the top as the issue on which progress will be marked. In the 1980s it was application development: We had an incredible appetite to build computerized versions of all our manual processes. In the early 1990s it was user interfaces: What could we do to make these systems easier to learn and use? Later it was interconnections: If we could just overcome the barriers to getting our customers and supply chains, to say nothing of our internal systems, hooked up, we'd be able to move forward. Currently the top-of-mind issue may be security. But the ground swell is developing that suggests an impending sea change toward a semantic focus that may last a fair while.

This book is meant to be your guide for taking advantage of this shift, at a minimum to avoid overinvestment in projects, technologies, and approaches that are unlikely to stand up to the changes. But for many of you this will be the opportunity to vault ahead of your competitors, either corporately or individually. Let's spend a minute discussing how this book can help with that.