Open Standards Essential to Orchestrating Multiple Tools

[Taxonomy Bootcamp 2011 Comment] While many organizations employ multiple software tools to perform similar functions, such as categorization, search, etc., this does not necessarily imply tool redundancy.  Particular tools have different strengths that are optimized for tackling different data sets or functional tasks within an enterprise.  There is, however, a very real need to orchestrate these tools.  Dave Clarke of Synaptica has long advocated that conceptual vocabularies combined with non-proprietary open standards are the key to unifying information that resides in disparate systems. Industry standards inform both the way vocabularies are constructed and the way they are interchanged.  Foremost among relevant norms is the brand new two-part ISO25964 standard (and its various national antecedents and implementations) and the W3C specifications SKOS and OWL.  Centralizing all controlled vocabularies into an enterprise vocabulary management tool allows different business units to maintain separate vocabularies while providing the means to 'wire' these different vocabularies together through mapping alignments.  For more information on the ISO standard visit: http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com/details.aspx?vunid=113659 and http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com/details.aspx?vunid=113662.