[Sigia-l] Question about the use of the term 'ontology'

[Peter Van Dijck]

The terminology usage is all over the place, so I'd just define 
something (say, "taxonomy") within your company - check if people are 
cool with it first.

Peter

ruth at ruthkaufman.com wrote:
> Background:
> I'm writing a project definition document for a project concerning the
> development of standards for product descriptions. A full set of standards may
> include editorial guidelines, presentation standards, interaction patterns, an
> XML schema or DTD, policies, controlled vocabularies -- anything that everyone
> in the organization must enable or comply with in order to make product
> descriptions sharable among systems and rendered consistently for users. I
> anticipate that we'll need to create or modify some controlled vocabularies.
> These may be corporate taxonomies, allowed values lists, or some other kind of
> -something-.
> 
> Question:
> Is 'ontology' the overarching term here for 'words for kinds of things'? I
> basically need one generic, all encompassing term to cover strict taxonomies
> and other kinds of controlled vocabularies and lists of things. In this post,
> I've used 'controlled vocabularies', but I have a vague recollection that this
> refers to something specific and isn't the best overarching term (or is it?). I
> have another notion that controlled vocabularies and taxonomies simply reify
> ontologies, in which case ontology wouldn't really be the right category
> heading... unless there are two meanings for 'ontology' -- one philosophical
> and one used by IT & knowledge workers. Any suggestions?
> 
> Thanks!
> Ruth
> ------------
> When replying, please *trim your post* as much as possible.
> *Plain text, please; NO Attachments
> 
> ________________________________________
> Sigia-l mailing list -- post to: Sigia-l at asis.org
> Changes to subscription: http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l
> 

-- 
Contact me:

peter at poorbuthappy.com
(or petervandijck at gmail.com)

Cell: +1 646-549-1513
(or +1 212 202 06 14)
Fax: +1 206 203 2983

-----
Website: http://petervandijck.net
Blog: http://poorbuthappy.com/ease

Skype account name: peterkevandijck
(see http://skype.com)

IM: peterkevandijck at hotmail.com
(I do NOT check this account for emails, IM only)