I have started a new blog at http://organizingknowledge.blogspot.com . I will be continuing to post my observations there! Thank you for reading this blog and I hope to hear from you at my new site! Andrea

In my last post (I was told that some people's heads exploded when reading it :-) ), I talked about some fundamental modeling concepts and how they help to define classes and their inheritance. The 3 concepts (defined by Guarino and Welty's work on OntoClean...

Recently, I have been reading about models/ontologies - their development, formal analysis, mapping/merging, and similar concepts. Being geeky, I was drawn to the book, "The Handbook of Ontologies" (ISBN 3-540-40834-7, published by Springer-Verlag in...

Someone sent me a private email asking about the origins of the name of my blog. So, here it is ... I originally started working on rules and expert systems a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away - in fact, it was Intel Architecture Labs, under...

The quote above comes from The People Are the Company by John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon Gray. It is a great quote highlighting where business process tooling seems to fail - in handling human interactions and their approaches to processes and problem...

But, it is really a chapter of a book on implementing ITIL (IT's Infrastructure Library) Configuration Management! http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1154763 This particular chapter is about figuring out what types of "configuration...

There are many different kinds of policies and rules - going from high-level corporate policies on how business is conducted and its information is secured, to extremely low-level rules about how a specific component in a piece of hardware or software...

Forrester says that "enterprises run by policies" (in their report from May of this year, "How the Convergence of Business Rules, BPM and BI Will Drive Business Optimization"). In turn, "policies create processes and rules", which "consume" and "generate...

While writing my last post on iterative design, I touched on naming entities in the model. I want to take just a few minutes to highlight some guidelines that I use for naming ... Do make the discussion about name choices a significant part of the...

Sorry to be missing-in-action again. But, my daughter's end of the school year, vacations and work seem to have gotten in the way of blogging. Well, I'm back ... :-) The topic of this post deals with creating a "good" model - and the need to combine...

I attended a talk yesterday, given by Roger Martin (Dean and professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management). He argued that businesses are driven by "analytical thinking" - the need to refine, examine and measure the past, limit...

Here is a guideline that I once wrote and that is often ignored (at least I have no fallacies about my ability to influence people :-)) ... Do not combine data definitions together into a single instantiable entity when an analysis of the managed environment...

In my previous post on designing a model, I discussed the need to view a problem space broadly and via specific scenarios. Since a model is supposed to serve as a conceptualization and abstraction of a problem space, we have to be careful not to be too...

Back to writing about modeling guidelines .... sorry about the long delay in my posts, but I got caught up in some standardization work that you will be hearing about in the next few weeks :-). I want to talk in this post about scenario-based modeling...

I'm not sure if folks took note of the Wall Street Journal article, " How to Tap IT's Hidden Potential " from March 10th. Interestingly, I just had a conversation with some IT customers on the question "Is IT a core business of my company?" Opinion was...

Sorry that I have been MIA over the last week. I had a customer visit out of the country, and then had tons of work to catch up on ... Let me return to my thread on modeling guidelines. A good design separates out different conctexts and aspects into...

Obviously, to solve a problem. But, what is that problem? Is it specific or general? Is the model to represent what has to go into a database or be manipulated by code now , or to simplify a complex domain in order to understand it? In the business...

IMHO, one of the best books on modeling never uses the words, "object-oriented" or "UML" or even "inheritance" (at least that I can remember). It was written by Gerald Weinberg and originally published in 1975. Just recently, the "Silver Anniversary Edition...

Another way to think about the title is semantics versus database/UML/... renderings. For me, "semantics" is not the structure or representation of data (property names, types, …) but the meanings, usages and conceptual hierarchies. An example is the...

I often find myself struggling to define what I do. "Solving world hunger" (in the "world" of common models and ontologies) - is one description, although it is a bit vague and altruistic. I had a much easier time of it when I was a programmer. Then,...

Well, this is my first attempt at running a blog - so, here goes. I spent today just getting everything set up and creating links to other blogs that I find interesting and/or useful (related to software engineering, modeling, semantic computing and business...