Introducing the Semantic Layer My employer was running a software architect's nightmare, the spreadsheet farm .  This happened because our business grew quickly in a short period of time due to the economic climate created in the 2008 aftermath.  Their core competency was not software so, naturally focus was elsewhere and they perhaps under-invested in technology.  Business users needed to respond to opportunities quickly and over time, ingeniously built their own software solutions using the tools they had available, (incidentally Turing Complete) MS Excel. Each day they consumed data from upstream partners to produce an array of reports which guided their decision making.  Junior analysts spent hours a day manually cleansing, enriching, and aggregating data.  This presented software engineering with an automation opportunity.  I introduced and built a semantic layer to house all of the enrichment data that had hitherto lived in s...