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

[Jack Park <jackpark@verticalnet.com>]

Many thanks for cross posting this, Paul.  The Denham Grey's comments are
valuable and worthy of further discussion.
Jack
From: 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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