Category

Ontologies

Name It to Change It

Adam names the animals

If you want to succeed at a creative project — and all change projects are — you will need to be particular about naming. As Dr. Warren Kinston has shown in his (please oh please soon) to be published framework on Creative Team Endeavors, naming is key. Wilfred Brown and Elliott Jaques emphasized in their works about Glacier Metal Company. Management is full of bad, fuzzy terms. Real science knows that you have to get particular in order to get something controlled.

It was a ironical email from Warren that got me thinking about this again. He was looking for some copyediting of some of his documents. One of the replies was fascinating:

Kinston's & Algie's guide on how managers can approach decisions

For Friday, here’s “Seven Distinct Paths of Decision and Action” by Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie from 1989. This paper describes the seven different approaches to decision-making, but note that it’s really about action.

What Makes a Good Ontology

Since we’ve been talking about naming, and Glenn Mehltretter posted such a great example in his comment, it’s a good time to consider Ontologies. Since Kinston’s Taxonomy is what the knowledge management people would call an ontology, I’ve been looking at them.

Barry Smith of the Basic Formal Ontology project at Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) has a som…

Copyright ©2008-2012 E. Forrest Christian. All Rights Reserved.