The Time and Technology is Here to Stand Software Engineering on its Head

As an information society we have become a software society. Software is everywhere, from our phones and our desktops, to our cars, homes and every location in between. The amount of software used worldwide is unknowable; we do not even have agreed measures to quantify its extent or value [1]. We suspect there are at least 1 billion lines of code that have accumulated over time [1,2]. On the order of $875 billion was spent worldwide on software in 2010, of which about half was for packaged software and licenses and the rest for programmer services, consulting and outsourcing [3]. In the U.S. alone, about 2 million people work as programmers or related [4].

It goes without saying that software is a very big deal.

No matter what the metrics, it is expensive to develop and maintain software. This is also true for open source, which has its own costs of ownership [5]. Designing software faster with fewer mistakes and more re-use and robustness have clearly been emphases in computer science and the discipline of programming from its inception.

This attention has caused a myriad of schools and practices to develop over time. Some of the earlier efforts included computer-aided software engineering (CASE) or Grady Booch’s (already cited in [1]) object-oriented design (OOD). Fourth-generation languages (4GLs) and rapid application development (RAD) were popular in the 1980s and 1990s. Most recently, agile software development or extreme programming have grabbed mindshare.

Altogether, there are dozens of software development philosophies, each with its passionate advocates. These express themselves through a variety of software development methodologies that might be characterized or clustered into the prototyping or waterfall or spiral camps.

In all instances, of course, the drivers and motivations are the same: faster development, more re-use, greater robustness, easier maintainability, and lower development costs and total costs of ownership.

The Ontology Perspective in this Mix

For at least the past decade, ontologies and semantic Web-related approaches have also been part of this mix. A good summary of these efforts comes from Michael Uschold in an invited address at FOIS 2008 [6]. In this review, he points to these advantages for ontology-based approaches to software engineering:

• Re-use — abstract/general notions can be used to instantiate more concrete/specific notions, allowing more reuse
• Reduced development times — producing software artifacts that are closer to how we think, combined with reuse and automation that enables applications to be developed more quickly
• Increased reliability — formal constructs with automation reduces human error
• Decreased maintenance costs — increased reliability and the use of automation to convert models to executable code reduces errors. A formal link between the models and the code makes software easier to comprehend and thus maintain.

These first four items are similar to the benefits argued for other software engineering methodologies, though with some unique twists due to the semantic basis. However, Uschold also goes on to suggest benefits for ontology-based approaches not claimed by other methodologies:

• Reduced conceptual gap — application developers can interact with the tools in a way that is closer to their thinking
• Facilitate automation — formal structures are amenable to automated reasoning, reducing the load on the human, and
• Agility/flexibility — ontology-driven information systems are more flexible, because you can much more easily and reliably make changes in the model than in code.

In making these arguments, Uschold picks up on the “ontology-driven information systems” moniker first put forward by Nicola Guarino in 1998 [7]. The ideas around ODIS have had substantial impact on the semantic Web community, especially in the use of formal ontologies and modeling approaches. The FOIS series of conferences, and most recently the ODiSE series, have been spawned from these ideas. There is also, for example, a fairly rich and developed community working on the integration of UML via ontologies as the drivers or specifiers of software [8].

Yet, as Uschold is careful to point out, the idea of ODIS extends beyond software engineering to encompass all of information systems. My own categorization of how ontologies may contribute to information systems is:

1. Domain modeling — this category includes the domain knowledge representations and reasoning and inference bases that are the traditional understanding of ontologies in the semantic space. The structural aspects are akin to a database schema definition; the unique aspects of ontologies reside in their logic foundations and graph structures, which offer more power in inferencing, reasoning and graph analysis than conventional approaches
2. Model-driven architectures (MDA) — like UML, these are platform-independent specifications that provide the functional and dataflow definitions of “models” executed by the system. These are the natural progeny of earlier CASE approaches, for example. Such systems also potentially allow graphical or visual means for building or hooking together components as a substitute to direct coding
3. Program specifications and excecutables — though fairly experimental at present, these approaches use the languages of RDF, OWL or direct use of logic languages to create the equivalent of executable software programs. A couple of experimental systems include Fhat and Neno, for example, point to possible future directions in this area [9]
4. Runtime or utility components — proper construction of ontologies can be a source for labels and prompts within user interfaces and other runtime uses. Because of the ontology basis, these contributions may also be contextual [10]
5. Automated agents — based on context, user choices and the governing ontologies, new instruction sets can be generated via what some term automated agents or “robots” to instruct subsequent steps in the software, including potentially analysis or validation. Mission Critical IT [11] is apparently the most advanced in this area; we discuss their ODASE approach more below
6. Bespoke drivers of generic applications — through using and combining a number of the aspects above, in its totality this approach is a very different paradigm, as we describe below.

When we look at this list from the standpoint of conventional software or software engineering, we see that #1 shares overlaps with conventional database roles and #2, #3 and #4 with conventional programmer or software engineering responsibilities. The other portions, however, are quite unique to ontology-based approaches.

But Is Software Engineering Even the Right Focus?

For decades, issues related to how to develop apps better and faster have been proposed and argued about. We still have the same litany of challenges and issues from expense to re-use and brittleness. And, unfortunately, despite many methodologies du jour, we still see bottlenecks in the enterprise relating to such matters as:

• data access
• queries
• data transformations
• data integration or federation
• reports
• other data presentations
• business analysis, and
• targeted, specialty functionality.

Promises such as self-service reporting touted at the inception of data warehousing two decades ago are still to be realized [12]. Enterprises still require the overhead and layers of IT to write SQL for us and prepare and fix reports. If we stand back a bit, perhaps we can come to see that the real opportunity resides in turning the whole paradigm of software engineering upside down.

Our objective should not be software per se. Software is merely an intermediary artifact to accomplish some given task. Rather than engineering software, the focus should be on how to fulfill those tasks in an optimal manner. How can we keep the idea of producing software from becoming this generation’s new buggy whip example [13]?

For reasons we delve into a bit more below, it perhaps has required a confluence of some new semantic technologies and ontologies to create the opening for a shift in perspective. That shift is one from software as an objective in itself to one of software as merely a generic intermediary in an information task pipeline.

Though this shift may not apply (at least with current technologies) to transactional and process-based software, I submit it may be fundamental to the broad category of knowledge management. KM includes such applications as business intelligence, data warehousing, data integration and federation, enterprise information integration and management, competitive intelligence, knowledge representation, and so forth. These are the real areas where integration and reports and queries and analysis remain frustrating bottlenecks for knowledge workers. And, interestingly, these are also the same areas most amenable to embracing an open world (OWA) mindset [14].

If we stand back and take a systems perspective to the question of fulfilling functional KM tasks, we see that the questions are both broader and narrower than software engineering alone. They are broader because this systems perspective embraces architecture, data, structures and generic designs. The questions are narrower because software — within this broader context — can be now be generalized as artifacts providing the fulfillment of classes of functions.

ODapps: The Ontology-Driven Application Approach

Ontology-driven applications — or ODapps for short — based on adaptive ontologies are a topic we have been nibbling around and discussing for some time. In our oft-cited seven pillars of the semantic enterprise we devote two pillars specifically (#4 and #3, respectively) to these two components [15]. However, in keeping with the systems perspective relevant to a transition from software engineering to generic apps, we should also note that canonical data models (via RDF) and a Web-oriented architecture are two additional pillars in the vision.

ODapps are modular, generic software applications designed to operate in accordance with the specifications contained in one or more ontologies. The relationships and structure of the information driving these applications are based on the standard functions and roles of ontologies (namely as domain ontologies as noted under #1 above), as supplemented by the UI and instruction sets and validations and rules (as noted under #4 and #5 above). The combination of these specifications as provided by both properly constructed domain ontologies and supplementary utility ontologies is what we collectively term adaptive ontologies [16].

ODapps fulfill specific generic tasks, consistent with their bespoke design (#6 above) to respond to adaptive ontologies. Examples of current ontology-driven apps include imports and exports in various formats, dataset creation and management, data record creation and management, reporting, browsing, searching, data visualization and manipulation (through libraries of what we call semantic components), user access rights and permissions, and similar. These applications provide their specific functionality in response to the specifications in the ontologies fed to them.

ODapps are designed more similarly to widgets or API-based frameworks than to the dedicated software of the past, though the dedicated functionality (e.g., graphing, reporting, etc.) is obviously quite similar. The major change in these ontology-driven apps is to accommodate a relatively common abstraction layer that responds to the structure and conventions of the guiding ontologies. The major advantage is that single generic applications can supply shared functionality based on any properly constructed adaptive ontology.

In fact, the widget idea from Web 2.0 is a key precursor to the ODapps design. What we see in Web 2.0 are dedicated single-purpose widgets that perform a display operation (such as Google Maps) based on the properly structured data fed to them (structured geolocational information in the case of GMaps).

In Structured Dynamics‘ early work with RDF-based applications by our predecessor company, Zitgist, we demonstrated how the basic Web 2.0 widget idea could be extended by “triggering” which kind of mashup widget got invoked by virtue of the data type(s) fed to it. The Query Builder presented contextual choices for how to build a SPARQL query via UI based on what prior dropdown list choices were made. The DataViewer displayed results with different widgets (maps, profiles, etc.) depending on which part of a query’s results set was inspected (by responding to differences in data types). These two apps, in our opinion, remain some of the best developed in the semantic Web space, even though development on both ceased nearly four years ago.

This basic extension of data-driven applications — as informed by a bit more structure — naturally evolved into a full ontology-driven design. We discovered that — with some minor best practice additions to conventional ontologies — we could turn ontologies into powerhouses that informed applications through:

• An understanding of the kind of things under consideration, including their inference chains
• The types of data in results sets, and how that informs the nature of the widget(s) (maps, calendars, timelines, charts, tabular reports, images, stories, media, etc.) appropriate to display and manipulate that information, and
• UI and utility functions such as interface labels, mouseovers, auto-suggests, spelling suggestions, synonym matches, etc.

Like the earlier Zitgist discoveries, basing the applications on only one or two canonical data models and serializations (RDF and a simple data exchange XML, which Fred Giasson calls structXML) provides the input uniformity to make a library of generic applications tractable. And, embedding the entire framework in a Web-oriented architecture means it can be distributed and deployed anywhere accessible by HTTP.

Booch has maintained for years that in software design abstraction is good, but not if too abstract [1]. ODapps are a balanced abstraction within the framework of canonical architectures, data models and data structures. This design thus limits software brittleness and maximizes software re-use. Moreover, it shifts the locus of effort from software development and maintenance to the creation and modification of knowledge structures. The KM emphasis can shift from programming and software to logic and terminology [16].

In the sub-sections below, we peel back some portions of this layered design to unveil how some of these major pieces interact.

Built Upon an Ontology- and Web-based Architecture

Again, to cite Booch, the most fundamental software design decision is architecture [1]. In the case of Structured Dynamics and its support for ODapps, its open semantic framework (OSF) is embedded in a Web-oriented architecture (WOA). The OSF itself is a layered design that proceeds from a kernel of existing assets (data and structures) and proceeds through conversion to Web service access, and then ontology organization and management via ODapps [17]. The major layers in the OSF stack are:

• Existing assets — any and all existing information and data assets, ranging from unstructured to structured. Preserving and leveraging those assets is a key premise
• scones / irON – the conversion layer, in part consisting of information extraction of subject concepts or named entities (scones) or the instance record Object Notation for conveying XML, JSON or spreadsheets (CSV) in RDF-ready form (via irON or RDFizers)
• structWSF – a platform-independent suite of more than 20 RESTful Web services, organized for managing structured data datasets; it provides the standard, common interface by which existing information assets get represented and presented to the outside world and to other layers in the OSF stack
• Ontologies — are the layer containing the structured assets “driving” the system; this includes the concepts and relationships of the domain at hand, and administrative ontologies that guide how the user interfaces or widgets in the system should behave
• conStruct – connecting modules to enable structWSF and sComponents to be hosted/embedded in Drupal, and
• sComponents – (mostly) Flex semantic components (widgets) for visualizing and manipulating structured data.

Not all of these layers or even their specifics is necessary for an ontology-driven app design [18]. However, the general foundations of generic apps, properly constructed adaptive ontologies, and canonical data models and structures should be preserved in order to operationalize ODapps in other settings.

OSF is the Basis for Domain-specific Instantiations

The power of this design is that by swapping out adaptive ontologies and relevant data, the entire OSF stack as is can be used to deploy multiple instantiations. Potential uses can be as varied as the domain coverage of the domain ontologies that drive this framework.

The OSF semantic framework is a completely open and generic one. The same set of tools and capabilities can be applied to any domain that needs to manage and understand information in its own domain. With the existing ODApps in hand, this includes from unstructured text or documents to conventional structured databases.

What changes from domain to domain are the data structures (the ontologies, schema and entity references) and their instance data (which can also be converted from existing to canonical forms). Here is an illustration of how this generic framework can be leveraged for different deployments. Note that Citizen Dan is a local government example of the OSF framework with relatively complete online demos:

(click for full size)

Structured Dynamics continues to wrinkle this basic design for different clients and different industries. As we round out the starting set of ODapps (see below), the major effort in adapting this generic design to different uses is to tailor the ontologies and “RDFize” existing data assets.

Lower Layers

Conversion of existing assets to RDF and canonical forms is not discussed further here. See the irON and scones documentation or the TechWiki for more information on these topics.

The structWSF Web Services Layer

The first suite of ODapps occurs at the structWSF Web services layer. structWSF provides a set of generic functions and endpoints to:

• Import or export datasets
• Create, update, delete (CRUD) or otherwise manage data records
• Search records with full-text and faceted search
• Browse or view existing records or record sets, based on simple to possible complex selection or filtering criteria, or
• Process results sets through workflows of various natures, involving specialized analysis, information extraction or other functions.

Here is a listing of current ODapp functions within structWSF (with links to details for each):

At this level the information access and processing is done largely on the basis of structured results sets. Other visualization and display ODapps are listed in the next subsection.

The Semantics Components Layer

The visualization and data display and manipulation ODapps are provided via the semantic components layer. Structured Dynamics’s sComponents are Flex-based widgets that conform to a standard, generic design. Other developers using the OSF framework are developing JavaScript versions [19]. Here is the current library (with links to details for each):

These components can be used in combination with any of the structWSF ODapps, meaning the filtering, searching, browsing, import/export, etc., may be combined as an input or output option with the above.

The next animated figure shows how the basic interaction flow works with these components:

(click for full size)

Using the ODapp structure it is possible to either “drive” queries and results sets selections via direct HTTP request via endpoints (not shown) or via simple dropdown selections on HTML forms or Flex widgets (shown). This design enables the entire system to be driven via simple selections or interactions without the need for any programming or technical expertise.

As the diagram shows, these various sComponents get embedded in a layout canvas for the Web page. By interacting with the various components, new queries are generated (most often as SPARQL queries) to the various structWSF Web services endpoints. The result of these requests is to generate a structured results set, which includes various types and attributes.

An internal ontology that embodies the desired behavior and display options (SCO, the Semantic Component Ontology) is matched with these types and attributes to generate the formal instructions to the sComponents. When combined with the results set data, and attribute information in the irON ontology, plus the domain understanding in the domain ontology, a synthetic schema is constructed that instructs what the interface may do next. Here is an example schema:

(click for full size)

These instructions are then presented to the sControl component, which determines which widgets (individual components, with multiples possible depending on the inputs) need to be invoked and displayed on the layout canvas.

As new user interactions occur with the resulting displays and components, the iteration cycle is generated anew, again starting a new cycle of queries and results sets. Importantly, as these pathways and associated display components get created, they can be named and made persistent for later re-use or within dashboard invocations.

Self-service Reporting

Since self-service reporting has been such a disappointment [12], it is worth noting another aspect from this ODapp design. Every “thing” that can be presented in the interface can have a specific display template associated with it. Absent another definition, for example, any given “thing” will default to its parental type (which, ultimate, is “Thing”, the generic template display for anything without a definition; this generally defaults to a presentation of all attributes for the object).

However, if more specific templates occur in the inference path, they will be preferentially used. Here is a sample of such a path:

At the ultimate level of a particular model of Olympus camera, its display template might be exactly tailored to its specifications and attributes.

This design is meant to provide placeholders for any “thing” in any domain, while also providing the latitude to tailor and customize to every “thing” in the domain.

It is critical that generic apps through an ODapp approach also provide the underpinnings for self-service reporting. The ultimate metric is whether consumers of information can create the reports they need without any support or intervention by IT.

Adaptive Analysis

The Mission Critical IT reference provided earlier [11] helps point to the potentials of this paradigm in a different way. Mission Critical also shows user interfaces contextually chosen based on prior selections. But they extend that advantage with context-specific analysis and validation through the SWRL rules-base semantic language. This is an exciting extension of the base paradigm that confirms the applicability of this approach to business intelligence and general enterprise analytics.

Standing Software Engineering on its Head

All of this points to a very exciting era for enterprise and consumer apps moving into the future. We perhaps should no longer talk about “killer apps”; we can shift our focus to the information we have at hand and how we want to structure and analyze it.

Using ontologies to write or specify code or to compete as an alternative to conventional software engineering approaches seems too much like more of the same. The systems basis in which such methodologies such as MDA reside have not fixed the enterprise software challenges of decades-long standing. Rather, a shift to generic applications driven by adaptive ontologies — ODapps — looks to shift the locus from software and programming to data and knowledge structures.

This democratization of IT means that everything in the knowledge management realm can become “self service.” We can create our own analyses; develop our own reports; and package and disseminate what we and our colleagues need, when they need it. Through ontology-driven apps and adaptive ontologies, we can turn prior decades of software engineering practices on their head.

What Structured Dynamics and a handful of other vendors are showing is by no means yet complete. Our roster of ODapp widgets and templates still needs much filling out. The toolsets available for creating, maintaining, mapping and extending the ontologies underlying these systems are still woefully inadequate [20]. These are important development needs for the near term.

And, of course, none of this means the end of software development either. Process and transactions systems still likely reside outside of this new, emerging paradigm. Creating great and solid generic ODapps still requires software. Further, ODapps and their potential are completely silent on how we create that software and with what languages or methodologies. The era of software engineering is hardly at an end.

What is exceptionally powerful about the prospects in ontology-driven apps is to speed time to understanding and place information manipulation directly in the hands of the knowledge worker. This is a vision of information access and control that has been frustrated for decades. Perhaps, with ontologies and these semantic technologies, that vision is now near at hand.

Release of Semantic Components Adds Final Layer, Leads to Streamlined Sites

Yesterday Fred Giasson announced the release of code associated with Structured Dynamics‘ open source semantics components (also called sComponents).  A semantic component is an ontology-driven component, or widget, based on Flex. Such a component takes record descriptions, ontologies and target attributes/types as inputs and then outputs some (possibly interactive) visualizations of the records.

Though not all layers are by any means complete, from an architectural standpoint the release of these semantic components provides the last and missing layer to complete our open semantic framework. Completing this layer now also enables Structured Dynamics to rationalize its open source Web sites and various groups and mailing lists associated with them.

The OSF “Semantic Muffin”

We first announced the open semantic framework — or OSF — a couple of weeks back. Refer to that original post for more description of the general design [1]. However, we can show this framework with the semantic components layer as illustrated by what some have called the “semantic muffin”:

(click for full size)

The OSF stack consists of these layers, moving from existing assets upward through increasing semantics and usability:

• Existing assets — any and all existing information and data assets, ranging from unstructured to structured. Preserving and leveraging those assets is a key premise
• scones / irON — this layer is for general conversion of non-RDF data and data schema to RDF (via irON or RDFizers) or for information extraction of subject concepts or named entities (scones)
• structWSF — is the pivotal Web services framework layer, and provides the standard, common interface by which existing information assets get represented and presented to the outside world and to other layers in the OSF stack
• Semantic components — the highlighted layer in the “semantic muffin”; in essence, this is the visualization and data interaction layer in the OSF stack; see more below
• Ontologies — are the layer containing the structured assets “driving” the system; this includes the concepts and relationships of the domain at hand, and administrative ontologies that guide how the user interfaces or widgets in the system should behave, and
• conStruct — is the content management system (CMS) layer based on Drupal and the thinnest layer with respect to OSF; this optional layer provides the theming, user rights and permissions, or other functionality drawn from Drupal’s 6500 third-party modules.

Not all of these layers are required in a given deployment and their adoption need not be sequential or absolutely depend on prior layers. Nonetheless, they do layer and interact with one another in the general manner shown.

The Semantics Components Layer

Current semantic components, or widgets, include: filter; tabular templates (similar to infoboxes); maps; bar, pie or linear charts; relationship (concept) browser; story and text annotator and viewer; workbench for creating structured views; and dashboard for presenting pre-defined views and component arrangements. These are generic tools that respond to the structures and data fed to them, adaptable to any domain without modification.

Though Fred’s post goes into more detail — with subsequent posts to get into the technical nuances of the semantic components — the main idea of these components is shown by the diagram below.

These various semantic components get embedded in a layout canvas for the Web page. By interacting with the various components, new queries are generated (most often as SPARQL queries) to the various structWSF Web services endpoints. The result of these requests is to generate a structured results set, which includes various types and attributes.

An internal ontology that embodies the desired behavior and display options (SCO, the Semantic Component Ontology) is matched with these types and attributes to generate the formal instructions to the semantic components. These instructions are presented via the sControl component, that determines which widgets (individual components, with multiples possible depending on the inputs) need to be invoked and displayed on the layout canvas. Here is a picture of the general workflow:

(click for full size)

New interactions with the resulting displays and components cause the iteration path to be generated anew, again starting a new cycle of queries and results sets. As these pathways and associated display components get created, they can be named and made persistent for later re-use or within dashboard invocations.

Consolidating and Rationalizing Web Sites and Mailing Lists

As the release of the semantic components drew near, it was apparent that releases of previous layers had led to some fragmentation of Web sites and mailing lists. The umbrella nature of the open semantic framework enabled us to consolidate and rationalize these resources.

Our first change was to consolidate all OSF-related material under the existing OpenStructs.org Web site. It already contained the links and background material to structWSF and irON. To that, we added the conStruct and OSF material as well. This consolidation also allowed us to retire the previous conStruct Web site as well, which now re-directs to OpenStructs.

We also had fragmentation in user groups and mailing lists. Besides shared materials, these had many shared members. The Google groups for irON, structWSF and conStruct were thus archived and re-directed to the new Open Semantic Framework Google group and mailing list. Personal notices of the change and invites have been issued to all members of the earlier groups. For those interested in development work and interchange with other developers on any of these OSF layers, please now direct your membership and attention to the OSF group.

There has also been a revigoration of the developers’ community Web site at http://community.openstructs.org/. It remains the location for all central developer resources, including bug and issue tracking and links to SVNs.

Actual code SVN repositories are unchanged. These code repositories may be found at:

• structWSF
• conStruct
• Semantic Components
• irON Parsers.

We hope you find these consolidations helpful. And, of course, we welcome new participants and contributors!

Structured Dynamics Completes Design Phase; Citizen Dan First Exemplar

Structured Dynamics has been in a fervent — and, we believe, fruitful — design phase for the past 18 months. All of the working parts related to how to embrace becoming a semantic enterprise have now been defined and designed. Actual tools and components accompany many of these parts and have been deployed.

Recently, I have been speaking and blogging much about rationale, process, mindset and approach for how to bring semantics into the organization. But, prior to now, we have not spoken much about the overall design behind our approach. Today, as we complete our design phase and introduce our first exemplar instance of it — Citizen Dan [1] — we are finally in a position to describe this overall approach.

We term our approach the open semantic framework, also OSF. The open semantic framework is a combination of a layered architecture and modular software. The open semantic framework represents the software component of the four-component total open solution, recently described in a three part series. I return to this topic in the conclusion of this post.

Revisiting Design Objectives

Over the past nine months, I have been focusing my writing largely on the semantic enterprise, with more specificity regarding our Open SEAS (Semantic Enterprise Adoption and Solutions) initiative. In bits and pieces, these writings have tended to reflect a number of objectives:

• Leverage existing information assets (data + structure) as much as possible
• Develop incrementally, and validate and justify as you go
• Emphasize, where possible, open standards and open software
• Employ Web-oriented architectures
• Adopt an open-world approach that acknowledges that information is most often incomplete; the approach is a key enabler for incremental deployments
• Use URIs as object identifiers, and use linked data where practical
• Embrace any data format found in the wild, but use RDF as the ultimate integration data model
• Design architectures and APIs that avoid “lock-in” and support multiple tools options across the stack
• Provide systems and capabilities that put all information sources — text, media, semi-structured and conventional databases — on an equal footing
• Promote designs that bring the ability to create useful results into the hands of users and decisionmakers; relegate IT to a support role.

To date, the result of these design objectives is perhaps best captured in my Seven Pillars of the Open Semantic Enterprise posting, as well as our general discussions regarding adaptive ontologies. Yet, still, these writings have been somewhat piecemeal. What this document attempts to do is to place all of these perspectives into a single, coherent whole.

The Incremental Layers of the Open Semantic Framework

Structured Dynamics has been a strong advocate for layered architectures, with clear APIs between layers as appropriate. But these layers are not “laminates” that completely cover the layer below, nor are they all needed or necessary. Depending on the circumstance, some layers are unneeded or superfluous. Layers may be added or not incrementally.

In this manner, then, the open semantic framework is perhaps more akin to a pearl, than to a laminate or cocoon. Each subsequent layer does not “embed” the layer prior to it, and some layers actually may inter-operate with multiple layers below or above it (this is notably true for the “ontologies” layer, which has interactions up and down the stack).

Nonetheless, we can envision this pearl of the open semantic framework and its layers as follows:

(click for full size)

Others have termed this the “semantic muffin” or even “semantic muppet” or “semantic blob”. Whatever (hehe). The real idea is that layers may accrete (as in the growth of a pearl) and occur over time and be uneven. Each layer, though, does have a role to play (though it may not be needed in a given deployment), and does act to augment existing information assets in the transition to a semantic framework. Beginning at the core, each of these layers — with external references as appropriate for more details — is described below.

Existing Assets Layer

The open semantic framework is premised on leveraging existing information assets. Sure, once the framework is in place, new information can be brought into it in a more direct, semantic manner. But, the real thrust and benefit of this framework is to provide an incremental pathway for finally inter-operating and federating prior decades of data, structure and information assets.

These information assets may reside inside or outside the enterprise. They may (and DO!) exist in many formats and are described by many schema. They may come from internal transaction systems or warehouses, or may exist external on the Web or at supplier or partner sites. These information assets may span from conventional databases and relational data systems to XML interchange standards, Web pages and standard internal text or documents. In short, there is NO information asset that is not amenable to be included in this framework.

The Information Transformation (scones/irON) Layer

The information transformation layer provides either: 1) extraction of concepts and entities as structured metadata from source text or documents; or 2) conversion of existing data assets to interoperable form. As implemented by Structured Dynamics, the extractions are conducted by either scones (Subject Concept or Named EntitieS) or third-party utilities, and the conversions occur via irON (instance record Object Notation) or third-party “RDFizers“.

Depending on the source, the net result of the transformation is to produce interoperable data and information that can be ingested and used by other layers in the framework.

Though not strictly analogous, this layer bears some resemblance to the ETL (extract, transfer, load) utilities used in many enterprise information integration applications. Unlike those conventional systems, this information transformation layer also may capture and represent some of the source schema.

In all cases, however, these transformations are relatively simple and get parsed against the available structure (the ontologies, schema and entity reference lists) in the system to generate the semantic metadata (tags).

At this point, the extracted structure is generally at the level of instance records, or the ABox, with simple assertions of attribute-value pairs for specific records [2]. Little schema transformation or mapping occurs at this layer (if such is needed, that occurs at the structWSF layer; see next). Actual federation or interoperation occurs at later layers based on the TBox structures [2].

This modular portion of the framework is explicitly designed with APIs to allow third-party tools to be plugged in and substituted.

The structWSF Layer

The major workhorse of the open semantic framework is the structWSF (Web services framework) layer. structWSF is the most complicated of the OSF layers and has many supporting software packages and capabilities. The structWSF layer provides the standard, common interface (“canonical”) layer by which existing information assets get represented and presented to the outside world and to other layers in the OSF stack.

structWSF is a platform-independent Web services framework for accessing and exposing structured RDF data. Its central organizing perspective is that of the dataset. These datasets contain instance records, with the structural relationships amongst the data and their attributes and concepts defined via ontologies (schema with accompanying vocabularies; see below).

The structWSF middleware framework is generally RESTful in design and is based on HTTP and Web protocols and open standards. The current structWSF framework comes packaged with a baseline set of about twenty Web services in CRUD, browse, search and export and import. All Web services are exposed via APIs and SPARQL endpoints. Each request to an individual Web service returns an HTTP status and optionally a document of resultsets. Each results document can be serialized in many ways, and may be expressed as either RDF or pure XML. An internal representation, structXML [3], is used for internal communications across all structWSF Web services and with other layers.

structWSF has a central service that governs access rights and permissions. These rights occur at the level of the dataset, which gives immense flexibility to how data may be accessed, read, modified, created or deleted (or not). Datasets within a given structWSF instance may be accessed directly via API or via SPARQL queries to the instance’s endpoint. Depending on rights and query, results sets may be returned from a given structWSF instance in an infinite variety of ways.

This latter capability is the essential interface for subsequent layers in the open semantic framework stack. Depending on those subsequent components, pre-staged data and results sets may be returned for an essentially limitless variety of purposes.

Each structWSF instance also has a unique Web address that enables one or a multitude of instances to communicate and share with one another. This simple, but elegant, method enables structWSF instances to participate or not in potentially global or restricted local networks and collaboration environments. This is currently the largest untapped potential of structWSF with respect to its existing deployments.

The Semantic Components Layer

The newest layer in the stack is the semantic components layer. This layer takes results sets — most often generated by a specific query or data slice request — from one or more structWSF instances and then presents that information via a variety of data visualization or data presentation widgets (what we specifically call ‘semantic components‘ due to their design [4]). The operation and sensitivity of these display components are themselves driven by a presentation and data analysis (including statistics) ontology.

Current display widgets include: filter; tabular templates (similar to infoboxes); maps; bar, pie or linear charts; relationship (concept) browser; story and text annotator and viewer; workbench for creating structured views; and dashboard for presenting pre-defined views and component arrangements. These are generic tools that respond to the structures and data fed to them, adaptable without modification to any domain.

As presently implemented by Structured Dynamics, this layer consists either of Flex data visualization components or structured data display templates based on Smarty. The inherent design allows for updates to other bases (such as HTML5). The layer may also be swapped out or substituted with third-party capabilities.

The strength and power of this system is governed by its own ontology, the Semantic Component Ontology (SCO) (see next).

This is an extremely flexible layer in the open semantic framework stack. Expect an ongoing series of explanatory blog posts and online resources in the upcoming weeks to explain this innovative capability.

The Ontologies Layer

The ontologies layer actually refers to all structured assets driving the system. As such, this layer might be considered the “brain” (though rather simply specified!) of the open semantic framework.

At a true schema or TBox level [2], the ontologies layer represents the concept and relationships of the domain at hand. This layer also hosts the specific local entities and prominent things (people, places, events, etc.) useful for extracting local and domain-specific relevance. However, those views are also supplemented with some administrative ontologies (two examples are SCO and irON) that guide how the user interfaces or widgets in the system should behave.

The concept level represents the “world view” of the specific instantiation of the open semantic framework at hand. This conceptual (TBox) view provides the structural organization of information, inferencing capabilities, and navigation, faceting and explorer structure. The entity (ABox) view provides tagging for prominent individuals and instances important to the domain at hand, and guides the structure behind data visualizations of attribute or indicator data.

The administrative level uses simple roles and relationships for attributes and indicators to inform the framework as to how and with what widget to display information. For example, a “type” of information that is geographically related can be instructed to use the map component as an option for display. Whether some information is used for totals, comparison purposes, or other specifications useful to data visualization and graphing may also be specified.

The language and relationships (predicates or properties) of these administrative ontologies are simple and straightforward. It is, for example, relatively easy to define data display functions at the broad dataset and attributes level. Simple determinations drive how results sets and their associated results types may be displayed, no matter what datasets or slices may be generated as a result of the queries or requests fed to the system.

The structure in these layers can be replaced by other structures for other instantiations and circumstances. Indeed, all other layers in the open semantic framework can remain relatively fixed while tailoring the instance to new domains solely via this layer. The ontologies layer is what gives any given instantiation of OSF — such as Citizen Dan — its unique focus and scope.

The Content Management System (conStruct) Layer

The thinnest layer (that is, least substantial with respect to this framework) is the content management system (CMS) layer. In its current form, the open semantic framework uses the Drupal CMS via our conStruct plug-in modules. The design of the framework, however, has explicitly accommodated the possibility that other CMSs may substitute for this role.

The CMS layer is optional if structWSF endpoints are sufficient or if simple Web pages hosting semantic components are deemed as adequate. Very small organizations or deployments may reasonably choose to have no CMS layer at all.

However, for most sites or portals with more than a few active users, it is desirable to have broad flexibility in theming (“skinning”), user rights and permissions, or other functionality. These are the roles of the CMS layer. Drupal, for example, is presently supported by more than 4500 third-party modules in every conceivable function, from polling to blogs and rating systems and bulletin boards.

For such generalized portals or collaboration environments, it makes sense to adopt and install a flexible CMS system, such as Drupal. Much of the user experience and functional environment can be provided through such means.

The open semantic framework is thus designed to reside easily in a CMS while also providing the hooks to take advantage of the generalized user rights and functionality of the CMS. In this manner, the open semantic framework is able to stay focused on its structured data and interoperability purposes, while still gaining the advantages of rich-featured content management systems.

The OSF is a Web-oriented Architecture

With its inherent open-world orientation [5] and distributed and collaborative potential, the open semantic framework was designed from the outset to be Web-capable and Web-oriented:

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A Web-oriented architecture (WOA) has a number of understood requirements, to which the open semantic framework adheres. Specifically, these design considerations support the framework as being part of WOA:

• Data and objects are all identified with Web addresses (URIs)
• Data is generally exposed (and universally available) as linked data
• SPARQL endpoints and APIs are generally RESTful in design
• The overall architecture is modular, with inherent decentralized and distributed aspects
• All display and visualization aspects are cross-browser ready and capable.

OSF is the Basis for Domain-specific Instantiations

Citizen Dan is our first exemplar instance of this open semantic framework. The details page for the project goes into some of Citizen Dan’s functionality and capabilities.

Citizen Dan is specifically geared to local governments and localities, with an emphasis on community indicator systems (CIS). CIS have become a popular way of measuring and tracking measures of local economic and social well-being; they are closely related to sustainability and how to measure it as used in many economic and environmental domains.

However, in the context of this post, what is really interesting about Citizen Dan is that its semantic framework is a completely open and generic one. The same set of tools and capabilities described on its details page can be applied to any domain that needs to manage and understand information in its own domain. This includes from unstructured text or documents to conventional structured databases.

What changes from domain to domain are the data structures (the ontologies, schema and entity reference lists; see above) that are fed to this open semantic framework. By swapping out new structures, what can be called Citizen Dan in one instance can morph to become Curriculum Carla in say, the education instance or Doctor Doolittle in the veterinary science instance [6].

We can illustrate these multiple instances as follows:

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What this figure illustrates is that even a branded expression of the framework — such as Citizen Dan — is merely an instance of that framework. And, actually, when expressed in such a packaged manner, we can more accurately call the standard and bundled suite of generic functions and accompanying structure of Citizen Dan as an instantiation of the open semantic framework:

By replacing the structure bases, and by tailoring the function suite appropriate to a given market and use, we can create many instantiations of the open semantic framework for different domains and markets. In this manner, Citizen Dan can be seen as an early exemplar of the framework, but not as a definer and limiter to it.

OSF is the Software Leg to a ‘Total Open Solution‘

So far, this discussion has focused solely on considerations of software and architecture. While we see the power of the open semantic framework, highly useful in itself, this is inadequate alone to achieve acceptance and success in the enterprise (as we noted in our most recent posts). The very forces that are compelling enterprises to look at new options, are also the same ones that pose difficult hurdle rates for acceptance of open source.

To address this issue, we have developed a four-legged foundation to what we termed the total open solution. The solution involves software, structure, documentation and methods (or best practices). Each of these connect and relate to the other foundations.

The open semantic framework is clearly the software (and architecture) leg to this foundation. Again, however, what is interesting is that the mere swapping out of the structure can also make the system relatively ready for other domains.

We see these relationships in the following diagram, that also shows that the DocWiki portions of the solution embody the documentation (aside from code-level comments) and methods legs of the foundation:

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Differences between domains may also lead to differences as to which components are included or not in that domain’s desired instantiation.

The hugely important implied point, however, from the diagram above, is to show how nearly universal the content and methods in the DocWiki may be to other domains. Because the deltas between domains largely result from structure and what specific functional components are included or not, it becomes clear that most documentation and practices shared with the DocWiki will be applicable across domains. Sure, the use cases and some of the specific terminology may change, but we can also now see a high degree of re-usability of documentation and knowledge base across markets. This realization makes the usefulness and leverage of the DocWiki even higher.

A Common Language and Framework for Moving Forward

Developing “common language” by which to describe and convey things — especially new things like semantics that also have strong technical aspects — is tough, very tough. We are only now beginning on this process; we look to many in the community and elsewhere to help define informative and evocative terminology.

Per the original design objectives above, Structured Dynamics has approached the challenge of the semantic enterprise in what we think is both a pragmatic and a new way. The insistence on preserving and respecting existing information assets, matched with the opportunities and different mindsets arising from an open-world approach [5], have necessitated thinking through new designs and developing new concepts. Any time such new thinking and concepts occurs, new language and new metaphors must accompany it.

While certainly there are components and various software packages that populate and comprise an open semantic framework, the framework is also just as importantly a world view or way to think about information, information development, and its architecture. For example, a pivotal concept is that an open semantic framework is built around generic tools responsive to the information structures fed to them. This realization shifts the locus of emphasis from software development per se to creating, managing and adapting data and information structures. While this democratizes the information development process and is more inclusive of all knowledge workers, it also imposes needs for new toolsets and business processes. We are only at the nascent stages of understanding and learning about these differences.

Similarly, a development approach that is inherently incremental and leverages (rather than replaces or displaces) existing information assets means IT projects need to be considered in a new light. Small projects with more emphasis on tangible and demonstrable benefits will alter budgets, lower risks, and place a need for quicker turnaround. Like the architecture of the open semantic framework itself, projects based on OSF are also more distributed, decentralized and modular.

With such decentralization also comes the need for mechanisms and systems to overcome vendor “lock-in” and proprietary systems. A key thrust in support of what we have called the total open solution and its mixture of documentation and methods to accompany software and structure is specifically targeted at this issue. Tools and means for collaboration and concurrent contributions are another possible answer. Prior software practices in agile development and version control will see extensions to all manner of information development across the enterprise.

We are proud of our design work and proof-testing with clients over the past 18 months. We believe the open semantic framework and its implications to be a fundamental shift in how organizations need to think about their information development, existing information assets, and IT budgets and processes. We know widescale adoption is not yet at hand — enterprises are justifiably conservative when it comes to new thinking. But, given global competition and tight pocketbooks, the open semantic framework is a formulation to which enterprises and governments should pay very close attention.

Open Source, Open World, Web, and Semantics to Transform the Enterprise

Ten years ago the message was the end of obscene rents from proprietary enterprise software licenses. Five years ago the message was the arrival and fast maturing of open source. Today, the message is the open world and semantics.

These forces are conspiring to change much within enterprise IT. And, this change will undoubtedly be for the good — for the enterprise. But these forces are not necessarily good news within conventional IT departments and definitely not for traditional vendors unwilling to transform their business models.

I have been beating the tom-tom on this topic for a few months, specifically in regards to the semantic enterprise. But I have by no means been alone nor unique. The last two weeks have seen an interesting confluence of reports and commentaries by others that richen the story of the changing information technology landscape. I’ll be drawing on the observations of Thomas Wailgum (CIO magazine) [1], John Blossom [2] and Andy Mulholland, CTO of Capgemini [3].

The New Normal

Wailgum describes the “New Normal” and how it might kill IT [1]. He picks up on the viewpoint that ties the recent meltdowns in the financial sector as a seismic force for changes in information technology. While he acknowledges many past challenges to IT from PCs and servers and Y2K and software becoming a commodity, he puts the global recession’s impact on business — the “New Normal”– into an entirely different category.

His basic thesis is that these financial shocks are forcing companies to scrutinize IT as never before, in particular “unfavorable licensing agreements and much-too-much shelfware; ill-conceived purchasing and integration strategies; and questionable software married to entrenched business processes.”

Yet, he also argues that IT and its systems are too ingrained into the core business processes of the enterprise to be allowed to fail. IT systems are now thoroughly intertwined with:

• ERP systems – the financial, administrative and procurement backbone of every organization
• Business development and BI
• Operations and forecasting
• Customer service and call centers
• Networking and security
• Sales and marketing via CRM and lead generation
• Supply chain applications in manufacturing and shipping.

But top management is disappointed and disaffected. IT systems gobble up too many limited resources. They are inflexible. They are old and require still more limited resources to modernize. They are complex. They create and impose delays. And all of these negatives lead to huge losses in opportunity costs. Wailgum notes Gartner, for instance, as saying that by 2012 perhaps 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets at all in their desire to outsource this headache.

I think this devastating diagnosis is largely correct, though perhaps incomplete in that no mention is made of the flipside: what IT has failed to deliver. I think this flipside is equally damning.

Despite decades of trying, IT still has not broken down the data stovepipes in the enterprise. Rather, they have proliferated like rabbits. And, IT has failed to unlock the data in the 80% of enterprise information contained within documents (unstructured data).

Unfortunately, after largely zeroing in and mostly diagnosing the situation, Wailgum’s remedy comes off sounding like a tired 12-step program. He argues for new mindsets, better communications, getting in touch with customers, being willing to take risks, and being nimble. Well, duh.

So, over the decades of IT failures there has been accompanying decades of criticism, hand-wringing, and hackneyed solutions. Without some more insightful thinking, this analysis can make our understanding of the New Normal look pretty old.

Not Necessarily Good News for Vendors

John Blossom [2] picks up on these arguments and looks at the issues from the vendor’s perspective. Blossom characterizes Wailgum’s piece as “outlining the enormous value gap that’s been arising in enterprise information technologies.” And, while clearly new approaches are needed and farming them out may become more prevalent, Blossom cautions this is not necessarily good news for vendors.

As Blossom puts it, “what seems to be happening is that many of the business processes through which these enterprises survived and thrived over the past several decades are shooting blanks. . . . many of the fundamental concepts of IT that have been promoted for the past few decades no longer give businesses operational advantages but they have to keep spending on them anyway.”

As he has been arguing for quite some time, one fundamental change agent has been the Web itself. “The Web has accelerated the flow of information and services that can lead to effective decision-making far more rapidly than enterprise IT managers have been able to accommodate.”

Web search engines and social media tools can begin to replace some of the dedicated expenditures and systems within the enterprise. Moreover, the extent, growth and value of external data and content is readily apparent. Without outreach and accommodation of external data — even if it can solve its own internal data federation challenges — the individual enterprise is at risk of itself becoming a stovepipe.

Prior focuses on strategy and capturing workflows are perhaps being supplanted by the need for operational flexibility and on-the-fly aggregation and rapid service development tools. In an increasingly interconnected and rapidly changing world with massive information growth, being able to control workflows and to depend on central IT platforms may become last decade’s “Old Normal.” Floating on top of these massive forces and riding with their tides is a better survival tactic than digging fixed emplacements in the face of the tsunami.

These factors of Web, open source, agnosticism as to platform or software applications, and the need to mash up innovations from anywhere are not the traditional vendor game. Just as businesses and their IT departments must get leaner, so must the expectation of vendors to extort exorbitant rents from their clients. “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!” [4]

So, Blossom agrees with the Wailgum diagnosis, but also helps us begin to understand parts of the cure. Blossom argues the importance of:

• Web approaches and architectures
• Incorporation of external data
• Leverage of Web applications, and
• Use of open standards and APIs to avoid vendor lock-in.

Much, if not all of this, can be provided by open source. But open source is not a sine qua non: commercial products that embrace these approaches can also be compatible components across the stack.

A Semantic Lever on An Open World Fulcrum

But — even with these components — a full cure still lacks a couple of crucial factors.

These remaining gaps are emphasized in Andy Mulholland’s recent blog post [3]. His post was occasioned by the press announcement that Structured Dynamics (my firm) had donated its Semantic Enterprise Adoption and Solutions, or SEAS, methodology to MIKE2.0 [5]. Mulholland was suggesting his audience needed to know about this Method for an Integrated Knowledge Environment because some of the major audit partnerships have decided to get behind MIKE2.0 with its explicit and open source purpose of managing knowledge environments and their data and provenance.

As Mulholland notes, “. . . it’s not just more data, it’s the forms of data, and what the data is used for, all of which add to the complications. . . . Sadly the proliferation of data has mostly been in unstructured data in formats suitable for direct human use.”

So, one remaining factor is thus how to extract meaning from unstructured (text) content. It is here that semantics and various natural language processing (NLP) components come in. Implied in the incorporation of data extracted from unstructured sources is a data model expressly designed for such integration.

Yet, without a fulcrum, the semantic lever can still not move the world. Mulholland insightfully nails this fundamental missing piece — the “most crucial issue” — as the use of the open world assumption.

From an enterprise perspective and in relation to the points of this article, an open world assumption is not merely a different way to look at the world. More fundamentally, it is a different way to do business and a very different way to do IT.

I have summarized these points before, but they deserve reiteration. Open world frameworks provide some incredibly important benefits for knowledge management applications in the enterprise:

• Domains can be analyzed and inspected incrementally
• Schema can be incomplete and developed and refined incrementally
• The data and the structures within these open world frameworks can be used and expressed in a piecemeal or incomplete manner
• We can readily combine data with partial characterizations with other data having complete characterizations
• Systems built with open world frameworks are flexible and robust; as new information or structure is gained, it can be incorporated without negating the information already resident, and
• Open world systems can readily bridge or embrace closed world subsystems.

Archimedes is attributed to the apocryphal quote, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” [6] I have also had lawyer friends tell me that the essence of many court cases is found in a single pivotal assertion or statement in the arguments. I think it fair to say that the open world approach plays such a central role in unlocking the adaptive way for IT to move forward.

Bringing the Factors Together via Open SEAS

As Mulholland notes, we have donated our Open SEAS methodology [7] to MIKE2.0 in the hopes of seeing greater adoption and collaboration. This is useful, and all are welcome to review, comment and contribute to the methodology, indeed as is the case for all aspects of MIKE2.0.

But the essential point of this article is that Open SEAS also embraces most — if not all — of the factors necessary to address the New Normal IT function.

Open SEAS is explicitly designed to facilitate becoming an open semantic enterprise. Namely, this means an organization that uses the languages and standards of the semantic Web, including RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL and others to integrate existing information assets, using the best practices of linked data and the open world assumption, and targeting knowledge management applications. It does so based on Web-oriented architectures and approaches and uses ontologies as an “integration layer” across existing assets.

The foundational approaches to the open semantic enterprise do not necessarily mean open data nor open source (though they are suitable for these purposes with many open source tools available). The techniques can equivalently be applied to internal, closed, proprietary data and structures. The techniques can themselves be used as a basis for bringing external information into the enterprise. ‘Open’ is in reference to the critical use of the open world assumption.

These practices do not require replacing current systems and assets; they can be applied equally to public or proprietary information; and they can be tested and deployed incrementally at low risk and cost. The very foundations of the practice encourage a learn-as-you-go approach and active and agile adaptation. While embracing the open semantic enterprise can lead to quite disruptive benefits and changes, it can be accomplished as such with minimal disruption in itself. This is its most compelling aspect.

We believe this offers IT an exciting, incremental and low-risk path for moving forward. All existing assets can be left in place and — in essence — modernized in place. No massive shifts and no massive commitments are required. As benefits and budgets allow, the extent of the semantic interoperability layer may be extended as needed and as affordable.

The open semantic enterprise is not magic nor some panacea. Simply consider it as bringing rationality to what has become a broken IT system. Embracing the open semantic enterprise can help the New Normal be a good and more adaptive normal.