Welcome to Onto Goo!

This is a blog for people in the disparate information management community to come to terms and unify. I think it may be a long road, but over time it is achievable.

I am very pragmatic and technology neutral because I grew into a role where I model, on the clock, the world as business subject matter experts see it. I embrace the OMG's Model Driven Architecture idea of separating concepts from the technologies that implement them. I am a primary contributor to the OMG's Information Management Metamodel (IMM), responsible for a core ontology of information that provides a theory of how information technologies correspond to one another.

What is the information management community you ask? This is a community that spans multiple entrenched camps. The camps that come to mind usually center around particular technologies, such as object oriented (OO) languages, relational database management systems (DBMSs), XML schema, and OWL. For example, people who model in an ER tool are very likely to have grown up on relational databases. People who model in a UML tool are very likely to have grown up on OO languages. People who model in a tool such as XML Spy or Oxygen are very likely to have grown up on XML. People who model in Protege, TopBraid, or Knoodl are very likely to have grown up on RDF Schema and OWL. These camps generally see the world differently from other camps and think the others are wrong.

As I mentioned, I am technology neutral; however, one technology that I find is a superset of these other modeling languages and technologies is UML. "What?!" I hear you say? Yes, I assert that UML 2, with a couple of lightweight profiles, is a superset of all of these technologies and languages.