6. An article comprising a tangible machine-readable medium storing instructions operable to cause one or more machines to perform operations comprising: receiving from an application a semantic request having a request name that semantically identifies a type of information sought by the request, the semantic request comprising a uniform resource locator; converting, at a semantic object provider, the received semantic request to a generic request having corresponding request parameters the semantic object provider comprising a semantic object class defining an application programming interface to create an object, a semantic object implementation class to provide persistency, and an object registry to interact with a class implemented by a repository; initiating, by the semantic object provider, a creation of the object for receiving and converting the semantic request; opening a database connection within a data access system corresponding to the semantic request; requesting properties of data corresponding to the semantic request, if a database connection has not previously been opened; transmitting the converted request to the data access system; receiving data from the data access system corresponding to the converted request; and providing the data to the application.
6. An article comprising a tangible machine-readable medium storing instructions operable to cause one or more machines to perform operations comprising: receiving from an application a semantic request having a request name that semantically identifies a type of information sought by the request, the semantic request comprising a uniform resource locator; converting, at a semantic object provider, the received semantic request to a generic request having corresponding request parameters the semantic object provider comprising a semantic object class defining an application programming interface to create an object, a semantic object implementation class to provide persistency, and an object registry to interact with a class implemented by a repository; initiating, by the semantic object provider, a creation of the object for receiving and converting the semantic request; opening a database connection within a data access system corresponding to the semantic request; requesting properties of data corresponding to the semantic request, if a database connection has not previously been opened; transmitting the converted request to the data access system; receiving data from the data access system corresponding to the converted request; and providing the data to the application. 8. The article of claim 6 , wherein the object is a group object configured to access information about groups of entities.