TABLE OF CONTENTS This appendix is meant to provide a quick reference to some of the more important topics covered in this book.
Semantics is the study of meaning. It is of interest to us here because as we automate our business processes we cannot help but deal with the meaning of the information we are capturing and processing.
Semantics in business systems has been very informal up to this point. We "capture" requirements, expressed in "terms" that we define, yet the meaning of these terms is not very rigorous. As a result, systems are much more complex than they need to be, they are inflexible, and they tend to be difficult to integrate with other systems, because each system deals with similar but not identical semantic definitions for related terms.
Our best hope for dealing with our semantic overload is to spend more time understanding the meaning of the information we are dealing with. There are many techniques for doing this, and this book is just an introduction to these techniques. Some of the key approaches described herein include the following:
Reference ontologies An ontology is an organized description of the meaning of concepts and terms in a given domain. One of the first approaches that leads to shared meaning is to commit to a known or accepted ontology.
Semantic primitives Linguists and anthropologists have concluded that there are a small number of "semantic primitives" that are so fundamental that they are found in all languages and cultures, and are so...
