A cartoon about semantics

With this cartoon I try to illustrate semantic with as little words as possible. The scenario is as follows.

A trading company has an electronic data format about deliveries of goods. A new partner joins the network with a different format.

For each of the symbols the data mapper needs to find out what they mean and how they translate between data formats.

In this example the data mapper is investigating what A means and how it translates. He thinks hard and remembers that A is the Date of sending the Delivery. By calling up his partner and explaining that he is looking for this Date he finds out that they call it B.

He takes the classic approach and creates a script that translates A to B.

One month later another partner joins with again a different data format. Again he thinks hard and finds out A and B are the Date of sending the Delivery.

Because he does not make the meaning clear the mapper has to rely on his memory and make many phone calls. This is clearly error prone and a tiring process.

In Collibra's approach the meaning of the symbols is made explicit. Instead of saying that A equals B, we say what A means and what B means. The translation between data formats can then be derived using this information.

Do not just keep the meaning in your head. Make it explicit and you will save time and many  headaches.

Disclaimer: I have very limited drawing skills, so I relied on what I could find online. The stick figures are by Thor, created in Omnigraffle.

Moved back to Flanders

After living in Brussels for about 3 years, I have moved back to Flanders. I must say I appreciate the relaxing feeling of leaving the city and going home. I grew up in a rural area and this feels like properly going home again.

Brussels is a great city, but not my favorite. Culinary however, I don't think anything will top it price/quality wise.

The first week I experienced a false sense of happiness about traffic. Driving to Collibra took me 25 mins, which is only 5 more mins than before. This morning the came the hard truth with a 1 hour drive. It's still acceptable though.

I live now in Kampenhout in a proper house with a garden. Even before mowing my lawn the first thing I will do is organise a barbecue. Before I didn't even have a terrace, so I have some serious catching up to do.

I am also experimenting with my hifi setup, but that will be a later post.

Belgian Eclipse Community Meeting

The following is a copy from my post on the Collibra company blog.

Yesterday Hendrik from Sigasi and I organised the first regional Eclipse community meeting in Belgium. We had people from industry (Sigasi, Inventive Designers and Collibra) and academia (VUB students and a researcher from STARLab). Considering the very short notice on which we organised this and the "just-getting-to-know-each-other" intent of the meeting, this is quite reasonable.

We demonstrated our usage of Eclipse, and it is impressive to see how slick you can make your Eclipse product look. You get lots of stuff for free, but of course, we all had our complaints about lacking documentation and unresolved bug fixes. Nevertheless, in general the benefits far outweigh the negative experiences.

Dieter from Inventive Designers demonstrated Scriptura, an application for document flow control and reporting. They have been working with Eclipse since version 3.0 and have built up extensive experience after all those years. We really look forward to learning more from these guys, as they had to learn about some sharp edges in Eclipse the hard way.


Hendrik showed the Sigasi Hardware Development Tool that basically finally provides a real IDE for the VHDL language. Support for code completion, syntax highlighting, refactoring, etc. These are things we as software engineers take for granted, but are not so common for hardware developers. Eclipse really shines in reuse when you're extending the IDE.

We of course demonstrated our Collibra Studio that is still hard in development. We received many ideas from the discussions afterwards on how to improve our tools. This really makes this kind of community event very useful. Seeing how others solved problems can work very inspirational. It is tempting to lose focus with all these low hanging fruits :)

It is really hard to imagine that there was still no organisation of the eclipse community in Belgium. We now took the first steps in what will hopefully become a large community. Though I am confident that this will become a success. The enthusiasm of the participants and the support from the Eclipse foundation make that a sure bet.

I was actually quite surprised by how helpful the foundation is. Ralph Mueller from the foundation was very supportive and I'd be thrilled to invite him for one of our next events. We will make sure that there is enough time to announce this properly then.

If you would be interested to join the community, feel free to contact me. You could also take a look at the wiki set up on the Eclipse site.

I'm back

I finally did it it! I started blogging again after 2 years and a half of silence. During this time an unimaginable amount of things happened. That of course has the advantage I have a lot of stuff to write about. But that's for a next post :)

Expect more posts about Collibra (our company), semantic technology, Eclipse, Macs, Wine and my travels.