Monday, 5/21/2007
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Level: Technical - Introductory

This presentation explains what semantics and ontology are, in terms familiar to data modelers, DBAs, and IT management. With this explanation, those of us who have been doing "traditional" IT data management will be better able to respond to the challenge of managing all our company's information, no matter what kind of data contains it - VSAM files, relational databases, scanned documents, emails, spreadsheets, and other formats specific to various software tools. Our skills and knowledge are relevant to this task. We can answer this challenge. Indeed, who else in our companies is better prepared to do so? But the first step is to understand the challenge. And the best way to do that is to understand both what is new, but also what is already quite familiar, about semantics and ontology.

Dr. Tom Johnston received his doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Georgia in 1979. His studies focused on epistemology, ontology and the philosophy of language. The logician W. V. Quine was a central figure in his doctoral dissertation. Tom has been working in business IT for over three decades, and has worked as a data modeling and data architecture consultant for the latter half of that time. In the last decade, Tom's publications have focused on improving system and database flexibility by late binding semantics to both data schemas and to code. Tom is currently co-authoring a series of some twenty articles, in DM Review and DM Direct, on how to manage historical data about persistent objects, using today's DBMSs, and today's SQL.