Taxonomy, ontology and suchlike

More internet searches.

Been chasing down the distinctions between taxonomy, ontology and suchlike for the new mini-book on ‘enterprise-architecture for IT-architects’. There’s a useful set of Wikipedia links, of course:

• taxonomy (literally, “the arrangement of names”) – one of the core foundations for data-architecture
• ontology (literally, “the study of being”, or ‘is-ness’) – the basis for categorisation [the link I’ve given is for ‘computer-science’ ontology, but there’s also a Wikipedia article on general ontology]
• …and a whole bunch of metamodel stuff:
  • Knowledge Discovery Metamodel – “a common intermediate representation for existing software systems
  • Meta-Object Facility – “an Object Management Group (OMG) standard for model-driven engineering”
  • Model-driven architecture – “a software design approach”, also from the OMG

Those last three items are too IT-oriented to be much direct use for my style of enterprise-architecture, of course, but they do describe some relevant approaches that could be extended towards a whole-of-organisation level. (More ideas to track down in future! 🙂 )

Following on from the ontology link, a couple of additional useful articles:

• from Woody Pidcock of Boeing (via Metamodel.com): What are the differences between a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, an ontology and a metamodel? – a good general overview
• from Clay Shirky: Ontology is overrated: Categories, links and tags – a refreshingly iconoclastic view of categorisation with some useful one-liners, including:
  • “Q. What is Ontology? A. It depends on what the meaning of ‘Is’ is.”
  • “If you’ve got enough links, you don’t need the hierarchy [of categories] any more. There is no [book]shelf. There is no file-system. The links alone are enough.”

Following those Wikipedia trails led to yet more links, this time for enterprise-architecture from a Defence angle:

• International Defence Enterprise Architecture Specification (IDEAS) Group – an emphasis on IT-architecture, as usual, but with an emphasis on ontology (and not US-dominated, for a change, as implied by the spelling of ‘Defence’ on the website) – a couple of bonus links on the group’s history, and methodology, as derived from the BORO program (below)
• Business Object Reference Ontology (BORO) – kind of a defence-oriented root-level ontology, similar in aim to my rework of Zachman, judging from an very-incomplete list of BORO ‘reference ontologies’; and
• an overview of MODAF (the UK equivalent of the US DODAF Department of Defense Architecture Framework), showing the distinctions between the framework ontology and the viewpoints into that ontology

A linky week, really.