Semantic Interoperability

Semantics are different for everyone. In an organization, each department has its own semantics, to view data. Same data can have different meanings for one department as compared to others.

Salary for HR department is to know who is getting what and when they hire new candidate, they can refer to what others are getting based on role, JD, skill set etc.. But Salary for Finance department can be, to calculate annual expense for the company.

Semantic Layer in Decision Support Systems are based on business requirements, in their language, using their own key words, their codes etc.

Interoperability on the other hand is about exchanging something across systems so others don’t need to regenerate it again and again.

Semantic Interoperability is about exchanging semantic information across systems or across departments or across organizations. But this comes with a challenge whether the receiving party can understand the keywords, symbols, terminologies etc., from the sending party.

For example, in a Data Warehouse Solution, at Semantic Layer, there are few tables created to host data for medical industry. Now, when data from these tables are shared to another department, they should be able to understand what that data means or else the information flowing in will be useless.

In Federated Approach, Semantic Interoperability becomes very challenging and virtually impossible without Data Governance.