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GCN Home > 02/18/08 issue

Context is everything

CIO Council looks to semantic interoperability to expand data sharing

By Joab Jackson

Why is it so hard to share information between government databases? One theory gaining ground in federal interoperability circles is that the language used to translate the information is missing a critical element: verbs.

Database designers, in their relentless efficiency, allotted precisely defined individual data fields to contain all the data. In large part, they jettisoned any information about how those fields related to one another and to the agency that kept the information in the first place. In other words, they ditched the verbs that tied all the data elements together.

And they will need those verbs to share the information within their databases, especially if they want to share data on an ad hoc basis, said Lucian Russell, who heads Expert Reasoning and Decisions.

Russell spoke at a conference on information sharing held earlier this month by the CIO Council’s Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SiCOP).

Agencies want to share information with other agencies and, more important, avoid the drudgery of setting up individual point-to-point connections to do so.

This is where semantic interoperability comes in. Researchers such as Russell are developing tools and techniques that consider the meaning of data as a key to how it could be reused. If the data could somehow describe itself in a machine-readable way, it could be reused without human intervention.

“We’re looking at a change in the way computing gets done, which is less information-centric and more knowledge-centric,” said Mills Davis, founder of consulting firm Project10x and author of a recent report on such semantic technologies, “Semantic Wave 2008” (GCN.com, Quickfind 965).

“We’ve always put logic into programming.

But now, the representation of what we think we know — and the rules about reasoning about it — is being put into data structures, so a lot of different programs can actually access and play with these things,” Davis said.

Although the idea of semantic interoperability might seem abstract, the February SiCOP meeting showed a few examples of how it can work and even how federal agencies are putting the idea into use.

More news on related topics: Content / Record Management, Data Management, Workflow / Collaboration



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