Working ontologies LO26094

From: Grey, Denham C. (dgrey@iupui.edu)
Date: 02/09/01


What the heck is an ontology???
 
A (shared) expression of belief, an agreement on the terminology (and
sometimes the meaning) for communication and action. Ontologies serve to
bound discourse, facilitate communication within & across communities and
networks, leverage action by gathering agreement around values, objects,
the way things are and what is 'out there' that is important. Ontologies
help to orientate new folks and act as the stores for key learnings &
distinctions accumulated through experience. Ontologies have a large
influence on identity and help with the tacit transfer of context.
Ontologies IMO are destined to become a very influential part of knowledge
work.

Why mess with ontology?
 
The growing interest in object orientated technologies, eLearning objects,
business objects, the rise of XML as an industry standard, growth of
intranet content, instant communication via the web, dissatisfaction with
search results, integration of disparate (legacy) data stores, greater
emphasis on faster / better / cheaper in the marketplace, the emergence of
virtual business, portals and verticals. Interest in knowledge work,
greater attention to conceptualization, innovation and insights as key
drivers of the knowledge economy.

Ontologies hold promise for:
1) Providing a common language for different parties
2) Improving communications through sharing meaning and raising
social capital
3) Increasing alignment and leveraging self-organization via shared
understanding
4) Providing an enterprise wide schema for intuitive navigation
5) Being able to leverage language as a tool
6) Helping communities of practice to improve their dialog and make
key distinctions
7) Sparking innovation, helping to recognize emergent concepts and
improving relationships, i.e. KM

Key issues:
a) Enforcement and evolution: to gain leverage you need buy-in, to
gain innovation you need to change and experiment with the language,
finding the right balance is key.

b) Home grown vs. imported and adopted, or obtained and adapted:
think of co-design, messing with folks values and beliefs, need for
alignment. Advantages of unique distinctions vs. utility of wider
communications.

c) Natural practices or helped via tools: what tools should be
selected and which representations supported?.
 
d) Formal specification, inference and representation: somethings are
best left fuzzy, told through stories or conceived via a metaphor,
while formal ontologies allow machine processing, can be used by
agents and can be more easily tested for completeness and circularity.

e) From distinction to formal ontological level concept: when (at
what stage) does an (individual) perception/ heuristic, value become
an enterprise wide belief??

f) Just how much energy should be devoted to this?, how much
dissonance can be tolerated?

g) Separate categories for navigation / browsing, vs. indexing /
precision retrieval??

h) Coming to terms with terms: categories, concepts, topics. Labels
vs. objects themselves, capturing cathexis.

This stuff goes way beyond classification to influencing
organizational values and beliefs. Welcome to knowledge fundamentals.

So what do you think?
Are ontologies a part of your learning life yet!

[Cross posted at Brint]
http://www.brint.com/wwwboard/messages/9134.html

-- 

"Grey, Denham C." <dgrey@iupui.edu>

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