I just ask myself why there are no initiatives to develop standardized data models for customer  and organizational data - maybe I didn’t find it yet. But, wouldn’t it be such an improvement to not just talk about databases or data stores but about MDM stores. Don’t get me wrong, I do not think about building another CRM system with another “best data model“. I think about finding something in between providing applications and infrastructural engines. An commercial computing infrastructure which implicitly contains all the basic data models such as “Customer”, “Organization“, “Product” and so on. This would lead to a boost in interoperability of systems, data quality, …

What do you think. Right now its just a thought while listening to a talk of Adrian Cole of jcloud….

Some weeks ago, I participated in a workshop about the Semantic Web at the FU Berlin, which was quite interesting. During that day I begun to ask myself how it could be possible to connect the systems used for Managing Business Master Data with the idea of the semantic web to build a corporate data web which solves all the integration and retrieval problems Data Warehouses, OLAP, ETL (…) EAI, SOA, and Idenity Resolution Systems shall solve.

The more I thought about that idea the more I was confident that this will be a huge trend within the next 5 to 10 years. With RDF, Tripple Stores and their brothers and sisters enterprises will be able to connect the data within silos with the data of other silos. They will be able to retrieve external data and connect it on the model level by just extending and or transforming the underlying moder graphs. This idea, as any other idea isn’t new, as this link of IBM Research shows, but its still the very beginning of a fundamental swith in thinking about and handling corporate data: Humans and Maschines will be able to walk the graphs of data, identify relations between unknown entities and generate hypotheses and assumptions about the real world facts by just allowing the data to be connected by meaning and relationships; its just like it is in the real world.

To complete this post, I wanna give you an impressive List of videos and podcasts about the semantic web. Happy Watching:

http://www.semanticfocus.com/blog/entry/title/302-semantic-web-videos-and-podcasts/