Many organization’s attempts to document their business metadata stall when bringing stakeholders from different departments/sub-organizations together to attempt to identify and define key concepts. The process is tedious (and little can be done about that). But worse, stakeholders are rarely willing to compromise over term names and definitions. (E.g. same names, different meanings; different names, same meaning.) There’s also the problem of system-induced Stockholm syndrome, causing stakeholders to talk like application sales pamphlets. (Why is everyone a customer?) Semantic technology and the OWL standard provide managers, enterprise architects, and CIOs/CDOs the means for accommodating the stakeholders without sacrificing precision or completeness, and for supporting accurate reporting and processing subsequently. While eventually some key terms may require a kumbaya session or two, semantic technology can delay and reduce the agony of these.

• Summary of (and commiseration over) the problem of getting stakeholder agreement and capturing useful terms and definitions
• Quick ‘n’ dirty overview of triples
• Explanation of how the OWL "is the same as" and "different from" properties alleviate the problem
• Explanation of implementation, usage, and reporting to support EA and metadata management
• Brief description of some additional advantages of using semantic technology for EA and metadata management: start small, then scale up gracefully; design & implementation flexibility; rules language support; open standards; data portability. [NOTE: Yes, I know "agonization" isn't a real word.]