Chapter 4: Terms - Vocabulary, Taxonomy, and Ontology

Overview

Terms and facts are semantic constructs. They are meant to have meaning that is shared by anyone who uses them. Unless the producers and consumers of information agree, the information will be meaningless.

In any large business system, we are going to be dealing with thousands to tens of thousands of discrete terms. These terms are chosen from a much larger palette of possible terms for that industry and context.

These terms have to be defined and used consistently by all the people and all the programs that access data referred to by the terms. If this is done casually or haphazardly, or, as is more often the case, with the mistaken notion that "everyone knows" what these terms mean, chaos results.

This chapter examines where that chaos comes from and the role that taxonomies and ontologies play in helping make definitions more precise and more commonly understood. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how categorization relates to behavior, and the power of dynamic categorization.

We will see that the assignment of a business occurrence to a particular concept in a vocabulary or ontology is an act of categorization, which is how knowledge is applied in business systems.

This chapter examines business vocabularies and the various ways they are organized. We then go beyond that and begin a discussion on categorization and how the mere act of categorizing something (with the aid usually of a taxonomy or an ontology) gives rise to a great deal of knowledge.