Dear Friends, Associates and Industry Leaders:
Below are the introduction paragraphs of an open letter, directed towards participants and leaders in the information technology communities who are focused on semantic-based data element identification, contextual representation (ontologies and taxonomies including frameworks for representing same). This letter was also sent to groups that are concerned with communication of data element semantics, specifically Web Services groups, the Semantic Web groups and e-business standards groups. The letter was sent to approximately 450 targeted persons. To view the entire open letter at
http://www.geocities.com/johnchardin along with some additional information. The objective is to foster communication (beginning with a mailing list for discussion and archive) within the core groups that are identifying and designing global semantic solutions, and the standards / organizations that will utilize
them. To subscribe to the maillist, send an email to
<letterintro>
The Aerospace Industry Association's Electronic Enterprise groups (
http://www.aia-aerospace.org), the Association for Enterprise Integration (
http://www.afei.org), the Electronics Industry Data Exchange (
http://www.eidx.org) and others have been participating in the formation of an approach for identifying and managing semantic equivalency for data elements, and feel that this approach represents a potential approach for the IT industry, standards bodies and web services frameworks to move towards interoperability and convergence.
This approach is termed the Universal Data Element Framework (
http://www.udef.org), and is designed to provide a (semi) intelligent identifier, attached in some way to a data element (perhaps as an attribute within schemas or in an RDF based reference file), that can be resolved to produce an exact identification of the data element meaning.
This open letter describes, at a high level, a summarization of the usability of the UDEF within the various semantics/ontology/taxonomy communities, and the current status and efforts around the UDEF.
</letterintro>
Best regards,
John Hardin
