The Semantic Interoperability Work Group is a work group of The Open Group's Customer Council and Supplier Council.

Its mission is to enable semantic interoperability on a global scale by fostering the development and takeup of vendor-neutral semantic interoperability standards, best practices, and technologies. This will be accomplished by producing deliverables that prove semantic interoperability is real today, and demonstrating how it can add business value.

Background

Information architecture is a key component of enterprise architecture. According to industry sources, between 40% and 80% of application integration effort is spent on resolving semantic issues. Semantic interoperability is therefore crucial for achieving Boundaryless Information Flow^™ within an enterprise architecture.

Service-Oriented Architecture is a style of enterprise architecture that provides enterprise agility, and can make enterprise information available throughout the enterprise as needed, delivering Boundaryless Information Flow^™. But this implies that resources, including software services and human resources, must process information of different kinds, represented in different ways, and including both structured and unstructured data. That is, it requires Semantic Interoperability.

The need for Semantic Interoperability will become still greater if current expectations are realised for how SOA will develop, in combination with Web 2.0, and how enterprises will develop, with externalization of information.

Today, semantic interoperability problems are solved on a bilateral basis, and typically require substantial human intervention. The Working Group's vision is that they should be solved on a multi-lateral basis, and with the people taken out of the loop.

Objectives

The objectives of the Work Group are:

1. Develop a common understanding of types of semantic conflict.
2. Identify means based on open standards to resolve those conflicts.
3. Describe how enterprise architecture can cater for different kinds of information, both structured and unstructured, and support strategies for their interoperation, in a way that could be included in a future version of TOGAF.