Vocabulary Management

The Challenge

Organisations use different terminologies to describe their business and their environment. When organisations have to interoperate with each other, they need to understand each other. This challenge can be significant even when the organisations are similar, because their differences can be subtle.

Our Approach

We have started working with partners in the financial services industry and in government to understand how and why multiple organisations arrive at a shared common understanding of their business. We are investigating the use and extension of semantic technologies such as SKOS and OWL in the design of a system to formally define vocabularies and their relationships, and to automatically check for logical consistency. Future research may cover:

• Manging the maintenance of vocabularies when used as a reference for business people.
• Using vocabularies to inform the development of technical integration mechanisms.
• Formally defining business rules in terms of defined vocabularies, expressed in a user-friendly Controlled Natural Language.
• Use or integrations with rules-based approaches such as SBVR and the Business Rules approach.

Publications

There have been no academic publications to date from this technology area.