I.T. practitioners striving to meet changing business needs are using service-oriented architectures to speed development, improve visibility into the business impact of I.T. events, and lower integration and management costs. To reap these benefits, I.T. staffs need to provide some level of semantic integration between I.T. systems. Semantic integration means that not only do systems need to connect (that is, be able to exchange messages), they also need to have a common language for these messages to be translated into action in an automatic way. Without this shared understanding, messages are exchanged but must be translated by a human operator before resulting in any action.
