A Framework for Discovering, Organizing, and Using Business Semantics

This paper discusses how to capture business knowledge from the language of business people. It makes the case for a framework of business concepts as the basis for a rigorous understanding of business meaning. This semantic knowledge is the basis for a variety of modeling techniques that explore the business, its information systems, and their relationship. This semantic framework calls out for a new class of tools to support information systems analysis and design. We are in the midst of technology-driven and technology-enabled business evolution, as networks and information technology create new business niches. Technological innovations give rise to new opportunities and business innovations, as companies move in to take over new niches and sub-niches. These changes in the way of doing business create expectations of even better, more innovative performance on the part of technology. This completes a positive feedback loop by putting pressure on technology providers to support still more new and innovative forms of business behavior such as B2B and B2C e-commerce with increased security and payment processing, etc. Experience has demonstrated that the more application functionality is provided, the more users demand. We can get out in front of this requirement gap by anticipating user needs before they materialize. To do this we need to understand common patterns of behavior and semantic structure.