Enabling a Common and Consistent Enterprise-Wide Terminology: An Initial Assessment of Available Tools

A growing number of organizational enterprises (e.g. government, industry and academia) are adopting and utilizing the enterprise architecture (EA) model within their respective domains. The multi-tiered federal enterprise architecture framework (FEAF) is an example of the expanding role of interoperable Web services that span organizational domains (e.g. Navy, DoD, Federal and others). To enable such EA services, lexicon management and associated semantic alignment capabilities are an emerging requirement. The purpose of this paper is to report an initial assessment of currently available tools that in principle facilitate the implementation of a much needed semantic alignment process that helps address this emerging requirement for enterprise-wide lexicon services.