[xtm-wg] FW: [kmci-Virtual-Chapter] Re: Working ontologies

["Paul Prueitt" <bcngroup@erols.com>]

I thought that this was well done.  Any comments from the XTM community?



-----Original Message-----
From: Denham Grey [mailto:dgrey@iquest.net]
Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 9:36 AM
To: kmci-Virtual-Chapter@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [kmci-Virtual-Chapter] Re: Working ontologies


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 desitined 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 KM life yet! 

[Cross posted at Brint]





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