Forrester

Why Read This Report

There are many sources of enterprise information, and enterprise architects often face an uphill battle to integrate diverse information sources — systems, people, organizations — in the same company. Issues arise at the metadata exchange level, and differing vocabularies impede the creation and definition of enterprisewide standards. To solve these challenges, some users are taking advantage of semantic capabilities — like ontologies — in enterprise architecture (EA) tools to improve metadata exchange, data security, data cleansing, and change management. Although the largest players in the EA tools space aren't incorporating ontology editors into their products yet, smaller niche players and open source solutions are marketing their tools to enterprise architects and are beginning to gain traction. But ontology technology does not alone solve vocabularies reconciliation — organizations must also employ cognitive, repeatable methods to transform experts' knowledge into ontologies.