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Asset Management Solutions
Visualizing data is an essential part of any data analysis. The complexity of projects in large organizations requires the decomposition of those projects into simpler tasks managed by smaller, more or less autonomous teams within the larger organization. In addition, the recent development of sophisticated software tools such as those developed by KBSI has enhanced the effectiveness of decision, design, analysis, and other activities within these teams. However, the division of large projects in such a fashion creates a new problem: the difficulty of sharing information among the different project teams, their contexts, and the different tools supporting activities performed by those teams. The utility of supporting tools is a function of the degree to which they (and the agents that use them) can share information across their different contexts in the sort of distributed environments that are a hallmark of complex projects. However, the data produced by software of this kind is typically maintained in closed architecture databases. In the overwhelming majority of cases, each software tool has its own private data repository.
A complex representation (e.g., a data model or a business process model) carries the information in virtue of some established, systematic connection between the components of the representation and the world. It is this connection that determines the semantic content of the data being represented. Typically, however, the semantic rules of a representation system for a given application and the semantic intentions of the application designers are not advertised or in any way accessible to other agents in the organization. This makes it difficult, even impossible, for such agents to determine the semantic content of a database - semantic inaccessibility.
How is it possible to access the semantics of enterprise data across different contexts? How is it possible to fix their semantics objectively in a way that permits accurate interpretation by agents outside the immediate context of this data? Without this ability, the kind of coordination between enterprise teams necessary for a truly integrated environment is not possible. The use of novel visualization mechanisms is perceived as a critical technology enabler to address the semantic inaccessibility challenge.
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