My eyes were drawn, as they usually are, to one of my emails this morning that proudly advised “semantic search gets smarter”, an eWeek article. It turned out much less an article than an advertisement from Hakia, a semantic search vendor. My eyes were drawn to the headline since semantics and MDM are closely connected. A valid viewpoint says that MDM is focused on assuring semantic consistency of master data across the enterprise. But few of us would argue that MDM is a “semantic search” or even a specialist semantic technology. The discipline of MDM (not to be confused with MDM technology) creates an environment whereby process, people, and governance work to create what I have called a “semantic blanket” across the enterprise, thus assuring and sustaining semantic consistency of one key information chain: master data. I don’t know about Hakia (I don’t cover web-based semantic search), but I do know that several other vendors specialise in (master data) semantic within the enterprise. I wrote about a couple of such recently in some recent notes. Topquadrant was written up in Cool Vendors in Master Data Management, 2008, and Modulant in Vendor Guide: Master Data Management. You can’t adopt a discipline of MDM with a semantic engine alone; but once you have adopted MDM you will have achieved (and probably used) some semantic reconciliation and management technology.
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