Semantics: The Next Frontier in Systems and Databases

by Ken Orr

IT needs a breakthrough. With the increasing complexity of our hardware and software technologies and the increasing demands of our application systems, we desperately need "smarter" systems. For 30 or 40 years now, we have built systems around a number of primitive concepts about data and the meaning of data. In the 1960s, we built systems around "data files" containing various organized sets of "data fields." In the 1970s, we moved to talking about "databases" containing organized sets of "data elements." Since the 1990s, we have been building almost all of our significant business systems using "databases" made up of simple "tables" composed of "attributes."