Dave has been teaching computers to help humans communicate for over 20 years. Dave is currently the Chief Technical Officer for Contivo, Inc. Contivo's unique approach to enabling eCommerce relationships is an exciting opportunity to pioneer the combination XML, semantic analysis, eCommerce and community based knowledge systems. As the primary driver of Contivo's eCommerce solutions for accelerating deployment of B2B eCommerce trading networks, Dave is helped bring the Contivo eService to market and create the vision and relationships that will drive its success.

As a co-inventor of XML, Dave's involvement with XML began before XML had a name. Seeking a more efficient means to manage the large amount of data delivered by HP.COM, Dave was a member of the initial XML Working Group (known then as the Web-SGML working group). Dave co-authored the W3C Namespaces in XML Recommendation and XML Applications, a book from Wrox Press. Currently, Dave serves as co-chair of the W3C Web Services Architecture Group and XML Schemas Working Group.

Prior to joining Contivo, held senior technical positions as CommerceNet, Hewlett-Packard and Bell Laboratories as well as other companies. These positions provided a broad view of computer assisted human business communications. Dave developed facsimile and teleconferencing systems, animation and presentation graphics systems and when CD-ROMs were introduced, Dave joined Phillips and Dupont Optical to provide technical support for the emerging market and became interested in large-scale information publishing.

Most recently, Dave was a Director at CommerceNet which provided the opportunity to apply his background in XML, Knowledge Management and the Web to a wide range of research initiatives as well as contributing to projects such as to the eCo Framework, OBI and the Catalog Interoperability Project.

At Hewlett-Packard Dave developed CD-ROM publishing systems that are still in use today. The large quantities of information published monthly, at that time HP was the largest industrial CD-ROM publisher, led to the investigation of emerging information standards, including SGML an ISO standard for document markup. Dave led efforts to deploy SGML within HP and also worked with the OSF and Davenport Group to develop industry support for SGML based computer documentation. Dave then joined HP's corporate marketing group to architect, develop and operate HP.COM as it grew from an initial 5000 hits per day to over 1 million hits per day. In other corporate groups at HP, Dave was the architect for various intranet efforts including proxy server and web browser deployments, an intranet search engine providing access to 5000 servers and more than a million documents and an XML based product information publishing system.
On the personal side, Dave is a husband, father of two boys, and enjoys achieving very high scores at local golf courses.

Presentation
Vocabularies: Ontologies Specialized for Data Architecture
Interoperability of business systems is the principle goal of many of today’s computing technologies: EAI, EII, ETL, Web Services, SOA and the Semantic Web. Achieving interoperability requires understanding and adapting to application interfaces and the standards used for the messages that are exchanged between applications. While industry budgets are largely focused on the development of systems to move messages, the real impediment to interoperability is semantics—analysts estimate semantics may account for up to 95% of the effort.

There are lots of factors contributing to this imbalance. System architecture is more widely understood than the data and process oriented architectures needed to address semantics. Established product vendors have solutions for connectivity but not reconciling application semantics. And connectivity projects end while semantic interoperability requires ongoing effort. Regardless of the reasons, the imbalance hinders our progress as we integrate systems to streamline processes and respond to organizational flux.

Vocabularies are well suited to address the imbalance. When instrumented with systems to aid in their creation and maintenance vocabularies help teams understand the data requirements of application interfaces and message standards. Furthermore, vocabulary driven systems can deliver technical metadata to reconcile data semantics that can be directly used by business applications and the systems that provide connectivity.

For example, many systems and architectures today rely on XML Schemas as the metadata format to describe the vocabulary used by a system or in a message standard. Yet XML Schemas obscure the principles that underlie the vocabulary they are describing resulting in incompatibilities and a reliance on schema experts to understand and create even the most simple of schemas—that is without vocabularies. With vocabularies, novices and experts alike can create schemas to describe their data requirements and understand schemas produced by others.

This talk will explore how vocabularies specializes ontologies to address data architecture and system interoperability. They borrow from linguistics, XML Schemas and modeling to create an easy-to-use stable framework for understanding and accommodating disparate data requirements. Finally, this talk will show how vocabularies have been used in Contivo products to help organizations create, manage and deliver system interoperability.