Improving Data Governance in Large Organizations through Ontology and Linked Data

In the past decade, the role of data has increased exponentially from something that is queried or reported on, to becoming a true corporate asset. The same time period has also seen marked growth in corporate structural complexity. This combination has lead to information management challenges, as the data moving across a multitude of systems lends itself to a higher likelihood of impacting dependent processes and systems, should something go wrong or be changed. Many enterprise data projects are faced with low success rates and consequently subject to high amounts of scrutiny as senior leadership struggles to identify return on investment. While there are many tools and methods to increase a companies' ability to govern data, this research is based on the premise that you can not govern what you do not know. This lack of awareness of the corporate data landscape impacts the ability to govern data, which in turn impacts overall data quality within organizations. This paper seeks to propose a tools and techniques for companies to better gain an awareness of the landscape of their data, processes, and organizational attributes through the use of linked data, via the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and ontology. The outcome of adopting such techniques is an increased level of data awareness within the organization, resulting in improved ability to govern corporate data assets, and in turn increased data quality.