Two Kinds of Precision

Conversations between fact-oriented modellers and semantic web practitioners tend to go badly, and they usually go badly in the same way. Both sides are precise people. Both sides use the words class, property, instance, constraint and identity. Both sides walk away convinced the other has not understood something elementary.

The vocabulary overlap is the problem. The words are shared; the meanings are not. What follows is an attempt to lay out where the two traditions actually diverge, why those divergences exist, and what each one buys and costs. The examples are small on purpose. A five-line example tends to settle arguments that an hour of theory does not.

How FCOIM relates to conceptual, logical & physical data modeling (and more)

The Journey from 'Customer → Order' to a Formal Semantic Layer

Consider five ways to represent the same business reality:

Customer → Order
Customer has Order
Customer buys Order
The person <customer no> places order <order no>.
"The person or organisation, identified in our system as customer number 123, placed an order for our products or services identified by order number 20260991."

The final expression isn't just "better documentation"—it's the foundation of a semantic layer: a formal, structured representation of business knowledge that sits between your SMEs' expertise and your data systems. This semantic layer is the result of applying FCO-IM (Fully Communication-Oriented Information Modeling), not just an improvement in notation.

The added value of FCO-IM over other Fact-based Methods, for the business is its direct anchoring in business communication, which makes models easier to validate, more traceable, less biased, and more adaptable. This reduces risk, increases stakeholder involvement, and improves compliance — all of which translate to lower project costs and higher business confidence in IT outcomes.

Are you looking for an effective way to represent your business data? Database views are the perfect solution! A database view is a select statement that is run on tables to fetch meaningful data for some application. With views, you can easily represent meaningful business concepts. But which business concepts should be represented by tables, and which by views?