There is a lot of work being done in this area, however, and it is bearing fruit. At the standards setting body, OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), for example, they have come up with the universal business language (UBL) in an attempt to codify the terminology around the most common business practice: procurement.
UBL is being used by the government of Denmark and is currently being translated into a number of different languages. Because UBL provides the actual XML syntax, the information in UBL templates means the same thing to everyone regardless of their native tongue, said OASIS CEO Patrick Gannon. Of the 55 committee currently operating under the OASIS banner, 30-to-40 are focused on the issue of business semantics and the others are working on the technology side of this issue.
MITRE is also focused on this issue. They are currently working to crack the federated search issue so you can enter a term once, define it as a concept search or a keyword search, for example, and have the results come back the way you want them to from multiple sources. They are also applying social networking and bookmarking techniques to the issue of unstructured data. By allowing the people that actually use the documents and other data to tag it with what they feel are the appropriate markers, a “folksonomy” is developed.
The idea is fairly straight forward: People with common interests are probably looking for the same information using the similar search terms so why not let them help others by metatagging information in any way they see fit. The beauty of this approach is it is not mutually exclusive. The information can still be found by search engines that rely on keywords, for example. The folksonomy is an attempt to apply natural language search to structured data.
OWL, which stands for Web ontology language, is what the semantic Web relies on for its communication standard and The Open Group is working on universal data element framework (UDEF), which is a more pragmatic, engineering solution based on how you index metadata. And then there HL7, which is “a higher level of information about information that enables different programs written by different people in different locations to interpret the same information in the same way,” said Harding.
But, even with many, many smart people working very diligently to crack the IIO nut, these efforts are nascent at best. Reconciling data often means lots of people working lots of hours spending lots of time and lots of money. And this will probably not change any time soon. The hope is, once a lexicon is in place for the most common things all businesses do, machines can take over and allow us to do things in new ways we haven’t even thought of yet.