Comments on: MDM and the Semantic Enterprise

By: Brian Schulte

Brian Schulte — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:41:33 +0000

Good point. The term “rock solid” is over-the-top. I’ll modify by point to say that until you’ve got ’something going’ with MDM you should be careful setting expectations about using new technology to get you better information. (managing expectations is easier said than done) So when I think of ontologies and the semantic web I would like to see if they can make MDM easier – - before building on a house of cards.

Kingsley – I had trouble getting to your last 2 links.

By: Andrew White

Andrew White — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:56:07 +0000

Can MDM ever be “rock solid”? I talk with a lot of customers and I don’t think that there are many examples of, “rock solid” MDM. Most practical implementations make some great progress, but I think that the real world is limited to, “get something going, as best as you can, and build from there”. Seems to me that MDM is a long, long journey; one we have been on for a long time even before we used the term, MDM. However, your point overall makes a lot of sense to me overall: clean up the data before you start to take critical decisions based on it.

By: Brian Schulte

Brian Schulte — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 14:34:58 +0000

Customer segmentation is certainly a good place to try to engage business management on the topic. But, as you said in your blog, our big problem is still the money spent on “coping with the fact that much of our data is messed up…”. Tuning and polishing customer segmentation can only happen when master data is rock solid. Shouldn’t we be thinking about how we can introduce ontology-based solutions into the fundamentals of the MDM practice as it is still a very difficult, labor-intensive and expensive undertaking?

By: Kingsley Idehen

Kingsley Idehen — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:33:22 +0000

Andrew,

Two additional links in relation to MDM and RDF based Linked Data:

1. http://tinyurl.com/6a24ts – correction for last link in my earlier comment

2. http://tinyurl.com/6xerjd – a presentation of Linked Data that I gave at Linked Data Planet earlier this year.

Kingsley

By: Kingsley Idehen

Kingsley Idehen — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:30:59 +0000

Andrew,

MDM (which is grounded on an Entity-Attribute-Value data model) is one of the fundamental areas of enterprise data & information integration that benefits from technologies emerging from the “Semantic Web” vision realm.

For example, Let’s take the emergent “Linked Data” meme which is centered on the ability to construct Entity IDs (or Object IDs) using HTTP. In the MDM scenario this means giving HTTP based IDs to each “Customer”, “Order”, “Order Item”, “Employee”, “Product”, “Product Category” etc.. And due to the inherent power and ubiquity of HTTP in networked environments (e.g. World Wide Web or Intranets) you are able to access Entitiy descriptions (i.e., de-reference the attributes and relationships graphs in different representations e.g. HTML). This also means simply integration of data across MDM solutions.

I’ve been writing about some of these matters for a while and my blog contains a plethora of links to live examples such as:

1. http://dbpedia.org/resource/Linked_Data – showing the same principles using Wikipedia data via DBpedia project
2. http://demo.openlinksw.com/Northwind/Customer/ALFKI
3. http://data.openlinksw.com/oplweb/product_family/virtuoso – Product Information Integration (another realm associated with MDM)
4. http://data.openlinksw.com/oplweb/product_family/virtuoso – more detailed product release data .

Kingsley Idehen