Ontologies and Taxonomies

Are you struggling with how to make best use of your company’s knowledge assets that have grown overly complex?  Have you wondered how to blend the more informal taxonomic knowledge with the more formal ontological knowledge?  This has been a real head-scratcher for...

Part 2: Don’t let terms get in the way!

It frequently happens that a group of experts use a term so differently that they just cannot agree on a single meaning or definition.  This problem arises in spades in the area of ‘risk’. For example, in traditional operational risk management (ORM), when...

Part 4: Identify the underlying concepts

aIn the previous posts in the series, we discussed how it is important to focus on the concepts first and then the terms. Today we discuss identifying what the central concepts are in the enterprise. Every enterprise typically has a small handful of core concepts that...

Part 3: Concepts first, then terms

In my previous blog, I described how for very broad and general terms, it can be nearly impossible to get a roomful of experts to agree on a definition of the term. However, it can be relatively easy to identify a small set of core concepts that everyone agrees are...