On Vocabulary...

As it happens, one man’s dross is another man’s cereal topper. In case you didn’t know (it wasn't part of my vocabulary, so I had to look it up), dross is a mass of solid impurities floating on a molten metal bath. Apparently it’s used quite commonly as slang in the UK. Who knew?

Speaking of vocabulary, creation of another new component, Semantics for Business Vocabularies and Rules (SBVR), as part of the Model Development Tools (MDT) subproject at Eclipse has been approved. I’m really excited about this because now, not only will it be possible to model the various forms of data (relational data, logical data, conceptual data, business processes, etc.) in an enterprise using components in MDT, it will be possible to capture the semantics of the vocabularies and rules embodied by that data. Could it be that it will soon be possible to finally bridge the gap between business and IT using open source frameworks and tools from Eclipse? In light of this and other initiatives like the recently announced Open Requirements Management Framework (ORMF) project proposal, I’m optimistic that the answer to that question may well be “Yes!”.