Interconnection of Communities of Practice: A Web Platform for Knowledge Management and some related material made me think of the French “oil drop” counter-insurgency strategy.
With one important difference.
In a counter-insurgency context, the oil drop strategy is being used to further the goals of counter-insurgency force. Whatever you think of those goals or the alleged benefits for the places covered by the oil drops, the fundamental benefit is to the counter-insurgency force.
In a semantic context, one that seeks to elicit the local semantics of a group, the goal is not the furtherance of an outside semantic, but the exposition of a local semantic with the goal of benefiting the group covered by the oil spot. That as the oil drop spreads, those semantics may be combined with other oil drop semantics, but that is a cost and effort borne by the larger community seeking that benefit.
There are several immediate advantages to this approach with semantics.
First, the discussion of semantics at every level is taking place with the users of those semantics. You can hardly get closer to a useful answer than being able to ask the users of a semantic what was meant or for examples of usage. I don’t have a formalism for it but I would postulate that as the distance from users increases, so does the usefulness of the semantics of those users.
Ask the FBI about the Virtual Case Management project. Didn’t ask users or at least enough of them and flushed lots of cash. Lesson: Asking management, IT, etc., about the semantics of users is a utter waste of time. Really.
If you want to know the semantics of user group X, then ask group X. If you ask Y about X, you will get Y’s semantics about X. If that is what you want, fine, but if you want the semantics of group X, you have wasted your time and resources.
Second, asking the appropriate group of users for their semantics means that you can make explicit the ROI from making their semantics explicit. That is to say if asked, the group will ask about semantics that are meaningful to them. That either solve some task or issue that they encounter. May or may not be the semantics that interest you but recall the issue is the group’s semantics, not yours.
The reason for the ROI question at the appropriate group level is so that the project is justified both to the group being asked to make the effort as well as those who must approve the resources for such a project. Answering that question up front helps get buy-in from group members and makes them realize this isn’t busy work but will have a positive benefit for them.
Third, such a bottom-up approach, whether you are using topic maps, RDF, etc. will mean that only the semantics that are important to users and justified by some positive benefit are being captured. Your semantics may not have the rigor of SUMO, for example, but they are a benefit to you. What other test would you apply?