Model of all or part of the semantic aspect of a system
Introduction to the notion
The semantic model formally describes the business knowledge. It plays a key role in enterprise transformation. The semantic aspect is the subject of one or several semantic models.
A semantic model expresses the business knowledge, independently of how the activity is conducted. Such a model covers the business essentials, the minimum upon which agreement is needed for us to understand the business of the enterprise and its required behavior in its environment.
Strengthened by the object-oriented approach recommended by Praxeme, the modeling effort pushes for a generic semantic model. As this model goes beyond what is happening internally in the enterprise, its vocation is to state the universal. While ways of working will always differ from one enterprise to another, business notions and representations of the reality can, on the other hand, be more easily shared. A sufficiently stable and generic semantic model can be shared between several organizations. It normalizes the terminology and formalizes the business fundamentals in which partners will be able to recognize themselves.
Consequently, the semantic model forms an essential basis to support a network or a federation of enterprises. This stake comes into its own not only in partnership relations, mergers and acquisitions, but also in the coexistence of several companies or management teams inside a group or within the civil service.
In conclusion, the semantic aspect retains only the essentials of the business, beyond any variations in actual practice.
Providing that this spirit is respected, the semantic model presents characteristics that will play a vital role in transforming the enterprise:
- stability, because the semantic aspect is upstream from variations linked to the organization, practices and tools;
- compactness, because only the fundamental business concepts are retained in the model and expressed by applying a principle of economy;
- universality, because the focus is on the reality and we seek the most general and shareable expressions (as in the example about the person).
Related terms: semantic aspect, business object, semantic class, business fundamentals.
