Hi
Doug
This
is an interesting angle and extension to enterprise ontology development. This
perhaps is something that relates to your post. A while back I was looking at
meanings and mappings and the terms behind folksonomies and narrative within
social network / collaborative environments. Wherever you look in an enterprise
there are parts that have syntactic and semantic discipline and others where
the jargon, ambiguity and over use of metaphors (I would suggest that IT is one
of the biggest culprits of this) makes understanding very difficult without local
explanation.
I
think the identity of social systems within enterprises is supported by the
creation and use their own terminology. The bigger the enterprise the more
diverse and creative these terms become. It was an interesting task, mapping as
synonyms, some of these terms to more controlled sets. The question that arose
was just how much ontological support or rules should there be on these terms
within the development of business systems and the content within them.
Looking
deeper into this topic and I found George Lakoff’s publications very
interesting – Metaphors We Live By and Women, Fire, and
Dangerous Things
rgds
Marc
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