As organizations move toward describing domains of interest outside of their software systems, they'll need to decide whether to define important terms and concepts on their own or reuse more general vocabularies. See how semantic web tools can help with either strategy.
by Brian Sletten
November 7, 2007
o you like to relax in the morning over a cup of coffee and the "zoopepe"? Do you like to put "kapatz" on your "hogatz"? These are obviously meaningless terms to most people, but it is easy to imagine a young child using them in place of "newspaper," "ketchup," and "hotdog" because of how similar they sound. Parents have the option of correcting or playing along with their children when they make up their own words. In choosing the latter, they are accepting the terms as legitimate concepts within their child's vocabulary. While you'll find proponents of making children learn the right way to pronounce words from the beginning, you are just as likely to find an even larger number of people willing to let the children communicate freely without fear of getting it wrong, and confident that new and correct terms can be substituted at a later stage of development.
On the web and in the enterprise we frequently need to use terms from specific domains and vocabularies to convey meaning in a business context. Here, too, there is a tension between using terms that make sense to a particular party and adopting the concepts and relationships from a larger body. Most of the time our nouns, verbs, and relationships are caught up in our applications and business models. The whole thrust of the object-oriented methodology was conceived to model business terms in software. However, now there is a growing demand for modeling these terms and concepts outside of the software silos in which they are created to increase the opportunity for reuse.
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o you like to relax in the morning over a cup of coffee and the "zoopepe"? Do you like to put "kapatz" on your "hogatz"? These are obviously meaningless terms to most people, but it is easy to imagine a young child using them in place of "newspaper," "ketchup," and "hotdog" because of how similar they sound. Parents have the option of correcting or playing along with their children when they make up their own words. In choosing the latter, they are accepting the terms as legitimate concepts within their child's vocabulary. While you'll find proponents of making children learn the right way to pronounce words from the beginning, you are just as likely to find an even larger number of people willing to let the children communicate freely without fear of getting it wrong, and confident that new and correct terms can be substituted at a later stage of development.
