Concrete Abstractions

  Gist is based on something we call “concrete abstractions” Most upper level ontologies are based on “abstract abstractions” that is, they are based on philosophical ideas that might be correct but are counter productive to try to...

Ontologies and Taxonomies

Are you struggling with how to make best use of your company’s knowledge assets that have grown overly complex?  Have you wondered how to blend the more informal taxonomic knowledge with the more formal ontological knowledge?  This has been a real head-scratcher for...

The Treaty of Tordesillas

What history can teach us about semantics. Lately we’ve been grappling with the issue of how to get a Semantics Inference Engine and a Business Rules Engine to play nice in an Enterprise Architecture. Some long dormant neuron fired and the Treaty of Tordesillas was...

The Problem with Default Values

Are there hidden problems with default values in software? Virtually all information systems have “default values.” We put them in our systems to make things easier for the end-users as well as the system itself. As we will investigate in this white paper,...

The Magic Number in Complex Systems

Somewhere around 200 items seems to be the optimum number of interrelated things we can deal with at one time, when dealing with complex systems such as computer software. In 1956 George Miller wrote an article for the Psychological Review called “The magic number...