Publications

A draft OpenCDC specification, built on CloudEvents: a self-describing changelog format so any conformant CDC producer can feed any conformant consumer. Co-authored with the OpenCDC Working Group.

Why 'zero copy' claims around open table formats mostly move the copy rather than remove it.

Twenty-two years on from his first semantics article: why we still build enterprise data layers when meaning gets resolved at the point of use.

A personal reflection on being Gen X in technology, from full-stack Java in the late 1990s onward.

When does 'PostgreSQL-ish' stop being PostgreSQL? A data-integration take on the Postgres-compatible database market.

Agentic architectures echo the microservices 'death star' — the same hand-wringing over design patterns and observability, now with MCP clients.

A pushback on the 'zero data movement' siren song in data integration — the piece that Zero Magic in Zero Copy later follows up.

His return to long-form writing after a near-five-year silence — why he stepped away, and why he came back.

Distinguishing data mesh from the data lake, lakehouse and warehouse it keeps getting confused with.

Part of the Data Mesh series: trusted data events carrying transactions and ACID properties.

Part of the Data Mesh series: trusted, polyglot data streams as a backbone for distributed data.

Part of the Data Mesh series: data ledgers as a foundation for reliable data integration.

Part of the Data Mesh series: decentralization and modularity as the core data-mesh principles.

Part of the Data Mesh series: data-product thinking and the emerging role of the data product manager.

The opening post of his Data Mesh series, setting up the themes for 2021 and beyond.

His plain-language Wiley introduction to RDF, OWL and the idea that data can carry its own meaning.

Oracle white paper making the case for enterprise data services in SOA, delivered with Oracle Data Integration Suite.

SDForum talk comparing database approaches for storing RDF at scale.

InfoWorld webcast on data integration as the missing piece for successful SOA, with a Ross Stores deployment example.

Oracle Magazine interview on managing data integration as part of an SOA with Oracle Data Integration Suite.

STC 2008 talk on Oracle taking the semantic web mainstream and building the business case — tied to the release of Semantic Web for Dummies.

SOA Magazine article on master data management as the bridge between SOA and trustworthy, unified data.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 session on a global ETL migration from IBM to Oracle.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 session on enterprise data services at Oracle.

SDForum panel reframing Web 2.0 folksonomy and semantic-web ontology as complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

SDForum Semantic SIG panel (with Eric Miller, Ram Guha, Mills Davis, Susie Stephens) on why enterprises resist the semantic web.

STC 2007 session walking through real deployments — AGFA, Boeing, BT, Chevron, Eli Lilly, Oracle, Renault, Ordnance Survey — and lessons learned.

IASA conference talk on data-service patterns and deployment strategies — where data-service value shows up at enterprise rather than per-project scale.

Oracle OpenWorld session on the data-quality lifecycle with Oracle Data Integrator — key patterns and deployment strategies.

Oracle OpenWorld session on data-service patterns for enterprise SOA, delivered through Oracle Fusion Middleware.

ebizQ article: much of SOA's value is in the data it moves, and enterprise data services can unite BI, data warehousing and MDM with it.

A slim version of Cerebra University's CU-001 course — a gentle introduction to semantic technology and W3C standards for enterprise use.

White paper: data management is broken; an 'active' metadata layer — not another proprietary metadata tool — is what an SOA environment needs.

Semantic Technology Conference delivery of the introductory 'Beginning Semantic Solutions' course.

White paper on a semantic grid mediator for geographic information — reconciling GIS data and meaning across systems.

Talk on using semantic technology to break the hub-and-spoke data bottleneck and keep mission data long-lived rather than stovepiped.

Oracle Magazine feature (by David Baum) on the semantic web moving out of research labs and into the back office.

Cerebra University's multi-day, hands-on course teaching data modelers the essentials of OWL-DL modeling with RDF in enterprise systems.

Springer LNCS paper comparing the two roads researchers took — new languages in academia, pragmatic solutions in industry — for semantics in web services.

Peer-reviewed DAPD paper (with METU, Sun and CHECKMi) on making the OASIS ebXML registry standard OWL-aware for semantic discovery.

Lockheed Martin ITTC presentation: the enterprise semantic web as a standards-based way to get control over large information holdings.

TTI Vanguard talk ('All that Data') making the straight-talk case for semantic technology's value and ROI for serious data owners.

Semantic Technology Conference session on the uses, software and architectures of the enterprise semantic web.

DAMA panel slides: use a common, formal metadata language (OWL/RDF) to link vocabularies, structures and constraints across systems.

Multi-author SIGMOD article by people who built EII systems — uniform access to many sources without first loading a warehouse, and the challenges ahead.

Panel talking points: core EII capabilities are being subsumed into RDBMS and EAI toolkits, while semantics becomes the real battleground.

UK CJIT seminar introducing data semantics for automated, real-time processing of criminal data across agencies.

Cerebra demonstration of querying OWL ontologies with XQuery extensions, plus a primer on semantics, ontology and inference.

FCW feature on law-enforcement agencies using new technology to share crime and criminal data across international borders.

Red Herring article on how AI quietly became pervasive in everyday software long after the 1980s hype crashed.

Lockheed Martin MCES deck on enterprise semantic web architectures, grid service utilities, engine patterns and scalability.

White paper on augmenting data warehouses with ontologies and inference to raise data quality and sustain continuous ROI.

White paper: without smart data an SOA is just more plumbing — ontology, OWL and RDF keep it from being as brittle as EAI or CORBA.

Network Inference seminar at Xerox PARC: the top five reasons OWL matters for semantic web services, business inferencing and data integration.

Paper for the White House Conference Series arguing W3C semantic web standards will drive the next paradigm shift in integration and data management.

Presentation tracing integration's evolution — P2P, EAI, EII, web services — toward a semantic grid, with a network-centric warfare case study.

Panel remarks on how industry and academia diverge on semantics for web processes — timelines, intent, use cases and legacy constraints.

A W3C Data Access Working Group proposal that the emerging RDF query language adopt an XQuery-compatible concrete syntax.

Survey of how inference — rules- and logic-based systems — was changing enterprise software, with health, military and finance use cases.

Comparative look at rules-based, logic-based and hybrid inference (JESS, F-Logic, OWL description logics) for managing change in IT systems.

White paper on fusing service-oriented architecture with semantic web data specs to decouple services from systems for the network-centric enterprise.

His first Wiley book: an infrastructure driven by models of information, process and service that finds patterns and reconfigures itself across platforms.

Federal briefing arguing semantic interoperability — not SOA or process management alone — is the long-term fix for agency information sharing, with DHS as the case.

BIJ cover story on the data-retrieval bottleneck in law enforcement — catching criminals without trampling civil liberties.

Conference briefing on software interoperability for travel and transportation systems, framed around Modulant's context-mediation approach.

A storytelling column — fixing his London aunt's plumbing from San Francisco — about why web services still miss on meaning.

Modulant white paper: the unspoken reason integration stays hard is semantic mismatch between systems, not plumbing.

CIO Magazine piece on connecting systems, people and processes to unlock value from CRM, ERP and supply-chain investments.

EAI Journal cover story: web services are only an incremental step inside a much larger, still-unsolved integration scandal.

Modulant white paper forecasting 'computable semantics' — abstraction, metadata and ontologies — as the killer application after the internet.

EAI Journal feature on why most integration projects fail for lack of semantics, and how interoperability differs from integration.

Course publication from his UC Berkeley Extension teaching on software architecture best practices and patterns.

Course material on tradeoff analysis in the software development process.

An early Ernst & Young white paper arguing XML could carry data reliably from source to user where Java, ORBs and application servers alone fell short.

Companion E&Y paper: XML gives cross-platform Java applications the interoperable, standards-based data layer the language itself lacked.