Comment by heisenbit
2 days ago
I really believe a common vocabulary makes sense. But it is hard, very hard as you spread across organization (some to be bought and integrated), business processes and time. As soon as it comes to generating stuff things become hard. One may be able to generate interfaces between two systems but which enterprise has only two layers? Yes, if all knowledge is captured in the central catalog we may be able to do it but who builds this perfect database and maintains it?
Attempts to do this and survived either restricted themselves to being very abstract or limited their scope to specific use cases.
The problem I've seen is that you define your corporate entities, but then you have these systems in other divisions which need to extend it. Whether their division's special attributes get promoted to the corporate entity for everyone to use brings in politics and optimism. And making an update to a corporate-scoped entity then means you need solid change management.
IMO they can be very valuable in terms of reduced friction and costs, if you do it right and have enough rigor/discipline in the organization. Netflix might.
> Attempts to do this and survived either restricted themselves to being very abstract or limited their scope to specific use cases.
Wikidata? 1.65 billion graph nodes and counting under a common vocabulary.