Many business metadata management undertakings stall when stakeholders from different organizations don't want to compromise over term names and definitions. (After all, "account" means something very different for Purchasing than it does for IT.) This renders the development of something as basic as a metadata dictionary untenable. The problem is magnified when it comes to modeling enterprise data. Data thesauri, while helpful, are not operable by computers and so may not really solve the problem they were intended to address. Semantic technology and ontologies provide metadata/information managers, data architects, and CDOs the means for accommodating stakeholders' different contextual realities while still improving the metadata's clarity, correctness, consistency, and completeness. This presentation will: 

• Review some of the key challenges of metadata management.
• Introduce the fundamental building blocks of ontologies.
• Describe the "Unique Names Assumption" and why it is to be avoided.
• Explain the power of OWL equivalence properties.
• Provide examples of how semantics addresses these key challenges.