Making Reference Data More Meaningful: Benefits of a Semantic Standards-based Approach

A quarter to a half of all enterprise data is reference data or codes. It is critical to business and a significant source of operational risk. Yet there has been relatively little focus on reference data and its importance as an enterprise asset. Better management and governance of reference data clearly has high business value and, as a result it is starting to get a lot more attention.

This raises a key question: What is the best way to care for reference data to make it more meaningful, including knowing where it is used, where it comes from, and what it means in the context of applications that use it.

This talk will examine how semantic technologies offer an optimal platform for effective Reference Data Management. Based on a rich knowledge representation and standard query language, semantic technologies enable many capabilities to support a comprehensive solution, including:

a flexible NoSQL data model for dynamic modeling of reference data and support for its evolution
representation of any connections in a standards-based way that can be queried at runtime
agile business rules for data governance
provisioning of reference data with responsiveness to change in dependent systems and databases
establishing a direct relationship of the reference data with the business terminology
exposing reference data as part of the growing Linked data universe

Dr. Scott Henninger is the VP of Technology Adoption, Enterprise Vocabulary Network Manager, lead Product Trainer, and a Solutions Architect at TopQuadrant where he is responsible for product development and support for the TopBraid Suite. Leveraging his specialties in information retrieval and technology development and bringing over two years of experience in technology education, Scott has contributed to the design and delivery of TopQuadrant's highly successful training series for over eight years. Before joining TopQuadrant, Scott was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he spent 15 years researching and teaching advanced Web-based technologies, software engineering and human-computer interaction. He holds a PhD in Computer Science specializing in Information Retrieval, Software Engineering and Cognitive Science from the University of Colorado-Boulder.