According to a company press release, webMethods Inc. announced today that it has acquired substantially all of the assets of Cerebra, Inc., a privately-held leader in semantic metadata management technology.
The release includes a quote from webMethods CTO Marc Breissinger, which describes the technology in these terms:
"Despite the image typically presented by most modeling tools, business processes are both dynamic and transitory. With each component of the process possessing its own rules, parameters, and interrelationships, which frequently change based on a variety of circumstances, more complex processes simply breakdown due to the incompatibility of many of these interrelationships," said Marc Breissinger, CTO, webMethods, Inc. "When used to enrich a specific process, semantic metadata helps overcome inconsistencies by providing a higher level of agreement to meaning and intent. This allows for the richer orchestration of the transactions and interactions that fundamentally define the process. The end result is that semantic metadata enables higher levels of automation, more assured decision-making and greater efficiency throughout the process."
Cerebra's technology builds upon key W3C standards, including the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), to enhance the interoperability and run-time integrity of metadata. According to their web site, Cerebra's Chief Scientist, Ian Horrocks is a professor at the University of Manchester and seems to have a large list of publications in the field of semantics.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.