Adam names the animals

Name It to Change It, Because You Can’t Change What You Can’t Talk About

Forrest ChristianManaging, Warren Kinston 1 Comment

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:

Advertisment design study for Pierce Arrow automobiles (1915). By Edward Penfield. Via Library of Congress collection.

What Makes a Good Ontology

Forrest ChristianOverachievers 2 Comments

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) …