Dean Allemang

All organizations, including multinational corporations and government agencies, face a common problem of enterprise data integration. Obviously, large-scale sources of the problem stem from mergers and acquisitions. When a large company is formed from other pieces, each brings with it its own data, in its own form. But the problem isn't restricted to large conglomerates. All businesses have information trapped in a wide variety of forms, including e-mail, spreadsheets, Web pages and a variety of proprietary sources. More than ever, it's difficult for a business to know what it knows. This isn't a new problem, and a variety of enterprise data integration solutions have been on the market for a number of years to provide solutions to this problem. But the problem remains... (more)

Mashups and Semantic Mashups

In the early days of the Web, we were thrilled when we could find addresses and phone numbers of commercial establishments. As more sophisticated Web sites started using databases behind the scenes, we came to expect a page that included all the addresses for each branch of a chain in our city or neighborhood. When Mapquest came along, we were delighted that we could click a button and s... (more)