Richard Veryard

Richard Veryard (born 1955) is a British computer scientist, author and business consultant, known for his work on service-oriented architecture and the service-based business.

Veryard attended Sevenoaks School from 1966 to 1972, where he attended classes by Gerd Sommerhoff. He received his MA Mathematics and Philosophy from Merton College, Oxford, in 1976, and his MSc Computing Science at the Imperial College London in 1977. Later he also received his MBA from the Open University in 1992.

Veryard started his career in industry working for Data Logic Limited, Middlesex, UK, where he first developed and taught public data analysis courses. After years of practical experience in this field, he wrote his first book about this topic in 1984. In 1987 he became an IT consultant with James Martin Associates (JMA), specializing in the practical problems of planning and implementing information systems. After the European operation of JMA were acquired by the Texas Instruments, he became a Principal Consultant in the Software Business and a member of Group Technical Staff. At Texas Instruments he was one of the developers of IE\Q, a proprietary methodology for software quality management. Since 1997 he is freelance consultant under the flag of Veryard Projects Ltd. Since 2006 he is a principal consultant at CBDi, a research forum for service-oriented architecture and engineering.

Veryard has taught courses at City University, Brunel University and the Copenhagen Business School, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London.

In "Pragmatic data analysis" (1984) Veryard presented data analysis as a branch of systems analysis, which shared the same principles. His position on data modelling would appear to be implicit in the term data analysis. He presented two philosophical attitudes towards data modeling, which he called "semantic relativism and semantic absolutism. According to the absolutist way of thinking, there is only one correct or ideal way of modeling anything: each object in the real world must be represented by a particular construct. Semantic relativism, on the other hand, believe that most things in the real world can be modeled in many different ways, using basic constructs".

...
Wikipedia