Modellieren

To look at google 'Things, not strings' from 2012 from a different perspective:

Why, in many ontologies, such as gist, elements such as addresses or address components are not represented as strings, but as objects.

This forces us to attach strings to these objects. How impractical. One more hop to get to the printable address.

A customer's question gave me the idea of writing down the influences on my modeling strategies and my own attitudes and guidelines.

These are my rules based on my current experience at the end of 2023. They are not universally valid but document the status of my development.

In the wonderful talk "Design in Practice", Rich Hickey talks about how important an up-to-date glossary is in the design process.

I have a similar view, and see something like "Business Knowledge Blueprints" as an important foundation for business applications and especially for data models and (enterprise) knowledge graphs.

Today I listened to the workshop "Democratize the Knowledge Graph and Concrete Tooling Requirements" by Adam Keresztes at the 2023 Knowledge Graph Conference in NYC.

Different people there emphasized the difficulty of explaining the difference between classes and instances to non-ontologists.

Which had me reflecting on how I work with this terminology, and I found that I tend to use 'set' instead of 'class'.

Yesterday I was at the Connected Data Meetup in London, and listened to a presentation advocating taxonomies as starting points for ontology creation, by Madi Weland Solomon.

She didn't discuss this at length, so the following is my understanding, all errors and bad ideas are mine :)