Business Semantics: Best Practices for Gathering Precise Requirements

This presentation will deal with the complexities of gathering complex business requirements from users that use industry-specific terminology. I will use examples from healthcare, insurance, finance, law enforcement, real estate, education and banking. I will also discuss the use of controlled vocabularies and metadata registries to manage this process and standards for creating and storing metadata (SKOS and 11179). I will also discuss case studies in federal data exchange standards. We will show how the skills for developing semanticlly precise data defintions are critical for areas such as business intelligence and enterprise data reporting.

I will have PPTs for the class with screen shots and (hopefully) some working demos from actual software used in companies in the area.

Dan McCreary is an enterprise software architect with over 29 years of experience. He worked for Bell Labs, Steve Jobs (at NeXT Computer) and owned his own consulting company with over 75 employees. He has been active in the adoption of innovative software architectures that empower non-programmers. He has been very active in establishing XML standards in the areas of Criminal Justice, Education, Taxation, Real Estate, Banking, and Insurance. He is interested in all things XML, metadata management, data governance, the semantic web, and enterprise data strategy development. He has a special fondness for XForms, REST, and native XML databases.