At the Center for Semantic Excellence — the CSE — we’re developing methodologies and tools to enable communities and enterprises to do better on key performance indicators for cost, quality, access, and innovation.
The practical goal is to waste less time running in circles while trying to get anything done in today’s working environment. This goal is especially critical for addressing a class of problems defined as “wicked” in seriously multi-faceted domains such as healthcare, human resources, education, transportation, environment, energy, securities markets, manufacturing, and other information-rich sectors involving public and private participants. This covers most of business if you include global competition, standards compliance, and regulatory requirements in the mix.
Currently a lot of time and resources are wasted piling up “knowledge” in silos — over 25% of the knowledge worker’s day — rather than getting things done. And building up a costly immobilized knowledge base in individual knowledge workers just means the assets walk out every evening.
The complexity in multi-faceted domains creates dense networks of individual and business intermediaries to bridge the gaps within and among participants. The complexity compounds as knowledge sources multiply. This is increasingly costly, slow, and ineffective. In a workplace using web-enabled CSE tools, it doesn’t have to be this way.
At the CSE, we’re re-defining work itself around core terms and tools meaningful to market-based workers and managers (hence, “semantics”). These methods, tools, and technologies enable enterprises to expedite getting things done by bridging their business workplace gaps.
This directly supports the demanders and suppliers of action-focused resources, including employees, vendors, and customers. This works because the market-based workplace facets, refreshed and sustained by enterprise activity, allow the meaning of the jargon for valuable goods, services, and information continuously to be decomposed, packaged, and managed for unambiguous ongoing identification, assessment, and use.
We aim at the information challenge faced by enterprise managers who need to take action grounded in knowledge and information. In a given market, the descriptions of problems, challenges, and responses are leveraged by a tool-shared meaning of evolved terms (collectively, a marketplace for meaning — a Semantic Marketplace©).