Speaker
Bruce Gras
(IM-21)
Description
Your mechanic says your car needs a part called an ARG-92, but they only have the ARG-95 in stock. Will it do everything the original part does? The names seem similar, but how can you be sure?
The same problem arises in Enterprise Architecture, when the titles of architectural elements appear to match but don't. Or else they have different names but are the same thing (Would you like a Pop or a Coke?). Since a key goal of EA is to promote reuse and repurposing of existing IT investments, the solution lies in something called a Shared Vocabulary which is based on the technology of ontologies and which not only captures in a Semantic Net the Lexicon (structured language) in the EA for the enterprise, but also the Vernacular (ad-hoc language). This leads to developing a set of unified Namespaces for the enterprise and subsequent universal Sets of Classes for system definition, design and development. The consequence of this is the ability then to identify IT investments that can genuinely be reused and repurposed, as well as those that can staged as shared resources (which also naturally leads to effective SOA).
Primary author
Bruce Gras
(IM-21)