Yahoo is definitely a leader here, both in time and in approach: the power in the Web is within its users. Google has adopted well. Bing is a special beast: I like the way they have chosen for specialization in some areas.

Thanks for the pointers on the canonical model. It is also described as an enterprise integration pattern on http://enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/CanonicalDataModel.html

And of course, Bing is not lagging behind, but taking a different approach: http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2009/09/14/visual-search-why-type-when-you-can-see-it.aspx

Imagine employees of your organization making statements such as the following:

“What emerged was startling: 26 signs, all drawn in the same style, appeared again and again at numerous sites (see illustration). Admittedly, some of the symbols are pretty basic, like straight lines, circles and triangles, but the fact that many of the more complex designs also appeared in several places hinted to von Petzinger and Nowell that they were meaningful – perhaps even the seeds of written communication.”

From: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527481.200-the-writing-on-the-cave-wall.html?full=true

Hi Wim,

SBVR is an abbreviation for Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules, and is one of the Object Management Group (OMG) standards. It is focused specifically at the level of business modeling for your organization’s (or even industry’s) business vocabulary and rules (e.g., next to a BPMN initiative focused at your business processes).

As a standard, you should not consider it as an alternative to well known modeling notations (e.g., UML is one of the notations for SBVR modeling). Rather it is a conceptual framework of concepts that you have to deal with when you are working on a semantic layer (which is unavoidably a foundation for your data governance). Examples of such concepts: the business unit that owns or uses a certain term (= speech community), shared vocabularies across the entire organization (that you can incorporate), the distinction between a term and its meaning (i.e., “Client” and “Customer” as possible representations for the same concept, or synonyms), taxonomy, multiple rulesets applied on the same vocabulary, …

The SBVR standard is the only thing out there that can really help you in dealing with the complexity of the problem. It recognizes the fact that different communities (e.g., business units, geographical divisions, lines of business, backoffice, frontoffice, …) do use different ways of describing things – although they might actually mean the same thing. Doing anything in a narrower scope that the SBVR metamodel advises you to do will at a certain point in time put you at a dead end…

Concerning links, intro information can be found on the wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBVR ), the full details are of course available in the specification itself ( http://www.omg.org/spec/SBVR/1.0/ ) and I find that Mr. Hall’s presentation gives you something to help you understand SBVR ( http://www.omg.org/news/meetings/ThinkTank/past-events/2006/presentations/04-WS1-2_Hall.pdf ).

Hope this helps.