[Sigia-l] Re: Blasphemy: Ontology is Overrated?

[Listera]

IsisInform at aol.com:

> My theory of perspective taxonomy organizes information from the viewpoint of
> the client.  

That assumes you do or can 'think' like the client does...

>  I learned to think like my geothermal clients by lounging around the hot
> springs of the California wine country.

...I'd like to get gigs like that too, but it's not always possible.:-)

Indeed, for many projects the notion of 'client' is indeterminate: we don't
know who the client (in all variations) will/can be.

In business terms, it's like delegating executive powers to field staff,
without requiring them to go through a central bureaucracy. That's shifting
an organization's smarts to the periphery. Sure, a field rep may not have
the wisdom of an executive with 15 years of experience sitting at the HQ,
but what's important, at the end of the day, is the *aggregate* wisdom of
the entire organization as a distributed decision making apparatus. It's the
Yahoo vs. Google phenomenon.

Distributed decision making may not have the precision of central planning,
but it has lot of attenuating advantages, especially when you need to scale.

It's 2005, as an IA or a designer, we may not even be able to control our
artifacts:

<http://www.nivi.com/blog/article/greasemonkey-and-business-models/>

Ziya
Nullius in Verba