Concluding Thoughts

The good news is that you really can't make any mistakes here. Any effort you make to better understand your current systems, to consider the semantics of new systems or your integration efforts, to adopt new technology that will allow looser coupling, or to tag your current content with semantic tags, no matter what ontology or technology you use, will have short-term and long-term benefits. As we've discussed in each chapter along the way, your short-term efforts will yield immediate payback if you scrutinize them from a semantic standpoint. The long-term payoff comes because you will never be done upgrading your systems, but each upgrade from now on will be easier to the extent that your semantics have been captured and expressed. As mentioned previously, I have set up a Web site to explore ideas from this book more thoroughly and provide more up-to-date information. The Web site is http://www.semantics.bz.

Congratulations

I want to thank you and congratulate you on making it all the way through this book. Regardless of your background, there must have been sections that were unfamiliar, challenging, or perhaps just obtuse. So I thank you for hanging in there, and I trust you stuck with it because you found something of value. Now that you have made it all the way through I'd like to make three requests of you.

Request Number 1

While this is still fresh in your mind, would you drop me a line with feedback on the content of this book? If you found it directly useful to your work and would like to leave a testimonial that I could put on my Web site or on a future dust jacket, please email me at this address:

[e-mail]

Please let me know if I can use your name, your company name, or both.

Request Number 2

I hope to prepare a second edition of this book. I intend to update it with new information and new companies that have entered any of the spaces I have discussed. Most of all, I'm interested in your comments that would make this book more useful for other readers. Please send comments or suggestions concerning any parts of the book that are inaccurate, misleading, or hard to follow. I will attempt to incorporate as many of your suggestions as I can. Please email me at the following address:

[e-mail]

The most substantive comments will be acknowledged in the acknowledgments section, so please let me know how (or if) you would like your name and affiliation presented.

Request Number 3

Finally, and this is just a pet peeve of mine, perhaps you could help me by committing to remove this saying from your idiolect:

"It's just semantics!"