Ask a group of Semantic Web professionals where the data should live when you’re doing data integration projects – which is just what Cambridge Semantics VP Lee Feigenbaum, acting in his capacity as co-chair of the W3C’s SPARQL Working Group, did at a panel at last week’s SemTech – and don’t expect to get a single, agreed-upon answer.

Among the choices:

“Federation will crush warehousing,” Eric Prud’hommeaux of the W3C and its Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group said with an eye to provocation. “Leave data where the authorities have it and take advantage of individual domain contributions.” The basic idea of federation is that data stays in its source systems and you do integration dynamically, querying source systems on the fly.

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Photo Credits: Apple – FlickR/muffet ; Food Pyramid – FlickR/teacher_caroline_acsp

[Editor's Note: This article is intended to complement the post, "I’ve got a Federated Bridge to Sell You (A Defense of the Warehouse)" by Rob Gonzalez (Cambridge Semantics). Here, Michael Lang, CEO & Founder of Revelytix, weighs in on the degree to which federating information using semantic technology could compete with the capabilities delivered by data warehouses.]

The term “federation” is used often in the IT domain, but I have never seen it precisely defined, so here goes: A federation is a collection of entities that act according to a set of policies such that all of the entities interoperate and integrate with each other, and as a collection it is viewed as a single entity. Of course this definition is a description of the United States of America (which is a federation) – the road systems are integrated and interoperable, so are the legal systems of the states; and it could be applied equally well to the IT infrastructure of any large enterprise or the World Wide Web (emphasis on could), if we put the right pieces in place to make an IT infrastructure a federation. Read more

— MICHAEL LANG, BROOKE STEVENSON, MICHAEL LANG JR.

1. Overview

Semantic SOA Governance is a methodology ensuring that business missions are mapped accurately to the Services Oriented Infrastructure and that the services developed are reusable, thus reducing the time and cost of building new applications. Additionally, it facilitates deep analysis of the IT infrastructure in terms of the business operations and enterprise architecture. Two technologies, Semantics and Business Process Management (BPM), when combined with collaboration capabilities produce a dramatic new information management platform incorporating Operational Governance capabilities.

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