We are in the era of graphs. Graphs are hot. Why? Flexibility is one strong driver: heterogeneous data, integrating new data sources, and analytics all require flexibility. Graphs deliver it in spades ...

I was recently asked to present “Enterprise Ontology Design and Implementation Best Practices” to a group of motivated ontologists and wanna-be ontologists. I was flattered to be asked, but I really ...

What is a Semantic Model? The use of a semantic model as a fundamental step in the data warehouse development process can serve as a keystone for understanding requirements, the design of the ...

Peter Chen invented data modeling with his innovative way of showing data structures in terms of entities and relationships. For the first time, complex data could be modeled so it was understandable ...

We are living in the age of a data revolution, and more corporations are realizing that to lead—or in some cases, to survive—they need to harness their data wealth effectively. The data warehouse, due ...

It would be hard to imagine a data model that didn’t include persons, either as individuals or as groups. Models contain people in one of two ways: as organizational structures or as playing roles in ...

Recently, I was giving a presentation and someone asked me which segment of “the DAMA wheel” did I think semantics most affected. I said I thought it affected all of them pretty profoundly, but ...

The term “data culture” is frequently used to describe a normative view about how an organization functions (or more precisely, should function) with respect to its data. The term is not particularly ...

Running a business with dirty data is like trying to drive a car blindfolded — it’s only a matter of time before disaster strikes. Dirty data doesn’t just create inefficiencies, it drains resources at ...

Possibly, the most difficult problem to support in the relational model is hierarchical data. A hierarchy according to Webster is a “group of persons or things arranged in order to rank grade, class, ...

This column presents a new model for licensing and sharing data, one that I call the “Decision Rights Data Licensing Model” (or the “Decision Rights Model,” in a shorter form) and one that has been ...

Organizations are generating and keeping a more data now than at any time in history before. This is so for many reasons. First of all, the amount of data in general is growing. According to industry ...