Data warehousing extremely difficult and costly. Many organizations today require that teams consult a centralized data registry before new applications are created. The job title of an individual that is responsible for coordinating an organization's data is a Data architect. History The first reference to this term was at the 1999 AAAI Ontologies Panel. The panel was organized by Chris Welty, who at the prodding of Fritz Lehmann and in collaboration with the panelists (Fritz, Mike Uschold, Mike Gruninger, and Deborah McGuinness) came up with a "spectrum" of kinds of information systems that were, at the time, referred to as ontologies. The "ontology spectrum" picture appeared in print in the introduction to Formal Ontology and Information Systems: Proceedings of the 2001 Conference. The ontology spectrum was also featured in a talk at the Semantics for the Web meeting in 2000 at Dagstuhl by Deborah McGuinness. McGuinness produced a paper describing the points on that spectrum that appeared in the book that emerged (much later) from that workshop called "Spinning the Semantic Web." Later, Leo Obrst extended the spectrum into two dimensions (which technically is not really a spectrum anymore) and added a lot more detail, which was included in his book, The Semantic Web: A Guide to the Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management. The concept of the Semantic precision in business systems was popularized by Dave McComb in his book Semantics in Business Systems: The Savvy Managers Guide published in 2003 where he frequently uses the term Semantic Precision. This discussion centered around a 10 level partition that included the following levels (listed in the order of increasing semantic precision): Simple Catalog of Data Elements Glossary of Terms and Definitions Thesauri, Narrow Terms, Relationships Informal "Is-a" relationships Formal "Is-a" relationships Formal instances Frames (properties) Value Restrictions Disjointness, Inverse, Part-of General Logical Constraints Note that there was a special emphasis on the adding of formal is-a relationships to the spectrum which seems to have been dropped. The company Cerebra has also popularized this concept by describing the data formats that exist within an enterprise in their ability to store semantically precise metadata. Their list includes: HTML PDF Word Processing documents Microsoft Excel Relational databases XML XML Schema Taxonomies Ontologies What the concepts share in common is the ability to store information with increasing precision to facilitate intelligent agents. See also Enterprise messaging system Semantics SKOS Web service Classification