Currently when people
use the acronym “SI” they tend to refer to something known as ‘Systems
Integration’ or specifically to ‘Systems Integrators.’ However, the nature of
what a 'system' is and how that concept is evolving are going to change the way
that we look at this particular term in the relatively near future. I predict
that within the next ten years, ‘SI’ in the context of information systems
technology will primarily refer ‘Semantic Integration.’
The Evolution of Systems Integration
What I mean when I
say that Systems Integration and the notion of Systems are evolving is that new
design concepts and technologies are having a radical and disruptive influence
on current integration practices, processes and design approaches. What was a ‘system’
under distributed computing environments is now undergoing a transformation –
taking on aspects of both the distributed model used today and centralized
models from yester-year. This is largely coming about due to the advent of Services
Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology and design principles. It is important
to note here that SOA, like Semantics, is a practice area based upon design
philosophies and technical standards – the tools being developed in relation to
those philosophies standards or applied to it are not the drivers for these
trends. Folks who focus on the software tools only and not the underlying
principles tend to run into many difficulties in implementing these types of new
capability.
Our previous or
current experience with System of Systems architectures is what led to the need
for System Integration and Integrators largely as an afterthought or mitigating
action in response to the need for rapid deployment of multiple, new
distributed technologies. Most enterprises have spent the last twenty years
playing catch-up in this environment and few are truly architected in any
comprehensive sense of the term. System Integration is often a tactical
activity – ensuring data passes between systems silos, connecting various
applications point-to-point or through limited middleware capabilities,
deploying portals and unified sign-on and security management and so forth.
Piece by piece, an enterprise becomes more unified under this type of scenario,
but at a cost – that cost is increased complexity and expense for maintaining
non-standard integration.
The future is upon
us; that future is just now promising something new – the ability to coordinate
architectures across tiers, across federated domains and across all related
lifecycles. The new enterprise can be viewed as a single organic system,
consisting of dozens or hundreds of services that operate as a single unified
yet dynamic entity that is often federated across geographic and logical domain
or boundaries and orchestrated at runtime. This is SOA but it is more than SOA,
because SOA doesn’t yet have the necessary philosophical framework for
exploitation of Semantics to help achieve this enterprise unification. That’s
where Semantic Integration comes into the picture.
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| Semantic Integration is not a product, it's a new way to view Systems Integration & Engineering |
What is Semantic Integration ?
Semantic integration
is not is not confined to or restricted to the ability to operate or configure
or utilize specific semantic technology or software packages. Semantic Integration
represents a specialized field of practice dedicated to using Semantic Design
Principles, Methodologies and technology as a facilitating mechanism (often
alongside SOA) to help solve enterprise-level problems for IT. SI as a practice
area is relatively new (it is only now being defined), it is much more than the “Semantic Web” yet
is obviously built upon the capabilities inherent within the emerging set of Semantic
standards that can be used to express and ultimately visualize semantic
entities, RDF, OWL and so forth). Over the next several months, I will
introduce the specifics of this emerging practice discipline in this Blog.
Copyright 2012, Semantech Inc. All rights Reserved
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