“There is a burgeoning need for a standards-based, semantic approach to data governance. It is responsible for worming semantics technologies from the back offices of organizations to the forefront of some of the most pervasive applications of data and their relevance throughout the entire enterprise today. … By demonstrating tangible relationships between data elements that discern meaning, standards-based ontological models, vocabularies, and terminology systems are a vital means of implementing big data governance in a sustainable way. “Governance depends very heavily on preserving meaning,” TopQuadrant co-founder, CMO and VP of Professional Services Robert Coyne reflected. “In these complex ecosystems of systems, data and people, it’s very difficult to preserve meaning and relate meaning through relationships of things that are in different applications and parts of transactions. What semantic standards offer is an operational way to aid the preservation of meaning.””