New Use for Ontologies

Today I presented at the 2013 Taxonomy Boot Camp in Washington DC.  My presentation, Ontology Diagrams for Successful Knowledge Capture and Transfer, covered the use of ontologies as a means to understand and communicate a new topic.  Using an ontology engineering approach I discussed how ontology diagrams are effective in developing knowledge and sharing this knowledge.  In this approach, the ontology is used as a method for learning rather than as an end product.

During the conference I learned a lot about the importance of taxonomies in organizing information in knowledge management applications.  It was a good conference and I now know a lot about the issues of developing and maintaining a formal enterprise-wide taxonomy.  I also realized I do a little taxonomy work when I work on data models.