Mark Twain’s refinement in Business Semantics Management

According to Pieter, Business Semantics Management (BSM) is:

the set of activities to bring business stakeholders together to collaboratively realize the reconciliation of their heterogeneous metadata; and consequently the application of the derived business semantics patterns to establish semantic alignment between the underlying data structures.

Business Semantics Management

The picture above gives a good overview of the two different phases (semantic reconciliation and semantic application). I will not go into the details here (they can be found on Collibra’s website). Where Mark Twain comes in, is the Refine activity in the Semantic Reconciliation phase.

Whereas the first activity (Create) is focused at divergence (assembling different perspectives), Refinement is the first step toward convergence. It consists of applying a set of clear rules on the created semantic artifacts in order to harmonize them for a better semantic fit in your organizational community. By default, BSM offers a set of general rules (following the CURE principles – Complete, Reusable, Elegant, Useful), which range from basic (e.g., natural language above cryptic coding abbreviations) to more complex (e.g., objectification). This is a required first set, and your organization should roll its own on top of it to integrate in its overall organizational and cultural ecosystem.

I came across the following piece of text from Mark Twain (originally found at Caltech):

A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
by Mark Twain

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

Learning from this is easy: build your own organizational set of refinement rules, and apply them … or suffer your own little “Ingliy-spiking werld”.