My personal ontology, as seen on MindMeister.

Being efficient means processing things fast. You get through your to-do list quickly and, in any given task, you eliminate time-wasters. Being effective means choosing to do the right things. You eliminate time-wasting activities or “busy work” from your day.

She then goes on to explain that, in order to improve your effectiveness, you should “write down a list of all the commitments that you have in your life”, categorize them, and then analyze which commitments add to your life and which ones just take up time.

This is a brilliant suggestion, and will fit quite nicely beside my other key category in my personal ontology: Goals. So now, for each aspect of my life in my ontology, such as Family, Friends, Faith, Employment, Education, etc., I now have a sub-category of Goals, and a sub-category of Commitments. I can have Family Goals in my ontology, as well as Family Commitments. Employment Goals and Employment Commitments. And, as with the current Goals category, the new addition to my ontology also becomes a new top-level category in itself, linking to all the other Commitments in my life.

This makes for a very interesting emergent set within my personal ontology. That of Goal Commitments, and also of Commitment Goals. It could be that one of my Commitment Goals is a life-goal to reduce my overall workload, or to distribute my commitments more evenly. It also allows for a possible Goal Commitment, that I force myself to reviewing my life-goals on a monthly basis.

My wife and I have just now been discussing where our two cats fit into this personal ontology. As a childless couple, we often refer to our cats as our children, and thus Family. But technically they are not the same species, so could not be family from a strictly semantic point of view. We do own them, giving an ownership relationship similar to a house or a car. But they are more than just chattels. We often refer to them as our animal friends, but the Friend relationship fails a semantic test just as the Family relationship does. I am starting to think that perhaps our cats should best just be defined as Pets, and have a new top-level category for them. We can have Pet Commitments, and Pet Goals, I guess, so that would probably be the most appropriate. What do you think?

You prefer to work alone and focus on facts, data and processes. You rarely (if ever) make impulsive decisions; you make rational decisions based upon evidence. You are an inventive, creative intellectual. You are good at perfecting processes and systems. You prefer a work environment that is neat and tidy. “A place for everything and everything in its place!” is your motto. You are excellent at time management and prioritising projects. However, you can also become caught up in details and sometimes lose sight of the “big picture”. Others view you cool, calculating and independent. You often wonder how other people can talk so openly about personal issues and freely offer up opinions (without substantiating their claims). You prefer hobbies that you can master alone. You tend to strive toward perfection and mastery even while relaxing. You are not overly fond of surprises and last-second changes of plans. Loud, boisterous “surprise parties” would best be thrown for other people, you would prefer a quiet evening with a good book or movie.

… yeah, I guess that just about sums me up! Those who know me personally will no doubt wonder if the person who wrote that above quote is a close friend or relative of mine.

The part about “a place for everything and everything in its place” is why I am making this personal ontology. I feel the need to document, classify, and categorize everything around me, and how it relates to me. This primal need is the reason that I came across the arcane word “ontology” in the first place. It was not even a part of my vocabulary until a few weeks ago. I wanted to document my life, like I did when I was a teenager, but this time I wanted to give a name to the process of doing this. I am doing something, but what is it that I’m doing? So I set about to find a definition of what this process is, and came upon the word “ontology”.

This word stems from “the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic categories of being and their relations.”¹ This is the meaning that I was looking for when I started out to do my own personal ontology. But as I began digging, I found that the term has taken on a new connotation, as archaic words often do. In these modern times, it seems, the word “ontology” is also being used by leading-edge Internet mavens to describe the emerging ability of the web to be machine-readable. The Semantic Web, or Web 3.0 as it is sometimes called. In this understanding of the word, “ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts.”² I guess this is a close approximation of the original meaning, and why it was chosen. To pedantically define, classify, and categorize the elements or attributes of an object, and the relationships between those attributes, whether the object be a person or a document on the web.

Another interesting fact came out of my zapping around the Internet, registering myself everywhere. On several sites I was asked for my FOAF file location. I figured that this was another social network to register on, so I added it to my list of “must see” sites. When I finally got around to googling FOAF, I found that it meant “Friend of a Friend”. That sounds just like a social networking site, right? Wrong. There is no such site. It is not a website, but a project, “a decentralized technology for connecting social Web sites, and the people they describe.”³ This is the Semantic Web in action!

FOAF is about your place in the Web, and the Web’s place in our world. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online. The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

You see, we have that phrase “machine-readable” again. It is like the difference between an old-fashioned pricing label on a can of soup, and a bar code. The problem with bar codes, is that, while they may be machine-readable, they aren’t really all that human-readable!

I will continue working on my personal ontology using a graphical mindmapping tool, but I will also be exploring this FOAF phenomenon, as it appears to have a strong tie-in to my interest in online identity and online presence issues. It seems that I have found the “missing link”, the missing piece of the puzzle that I mentioned on my main blog Frittmann Forensics, when I said… “I haven’t developed my theories on personal ontology well enough yet to link that in as well, but I know that it is related somehow.” Now I know how it is related!

I don’t recall where I first came across the term “ontology”, but I guess it would have been while surfing the net one day. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines ontology as:

1. a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being;
2. a particular theory about the nature of being or the kinds of things that have existence

I recently found a quote from Clay Shirky that sums it up quite nicely…

Q. What is ontology?
A. It depends on what the meaning of “is” is.

I have been probing the nature of existence for a while now. Approaching middle-age often does that, so I am told. Who am I? Why am I here? I guess that this has also been spurred by the failed attempts that my wife and I made to have offspring. We have been through the IVF program and ended up with empty-nest syndrome, like some cosmic “Go directly to jail” card from the boardgame Monopoly. It has left me wondering what my purpose is in life, when all I thought of before was that I would be defined by my progeny. Funny how life works sometimes, isn’t it? As an adolescent I used to think that my life would be complete once I was married. Having accomplished that goal, my wife and I thought that our lives would be complete once we have children. Now we know that this will probably never happen, are we incomplete people? Barrenness is often equated to having a hole in one’s soul in the shape of a foetus.

Now my quest must begin again, to find meaning and purpose in life. The Christian faith of my childhood holds no comfort for me any more. Where was the loving Father, omniscient and omnipresent, when we were going through IVF? The footprints in the sand of my Savior who carried me through those hard times have long since washed away. My wife and I have had to take a step backwards, to return to that which we once thought would make us complete. Even that foundation trembles and fell away from under us once. With the emptiness in our hearts, the joy of marriage is diminished, but it is all that we have left to hold on to.

And so I attempt to define my place in this world anew by logical thinking, by critical analysis, and with the love and support of my wife. In my adolescence, just as when approaching middle-age, I had reason to probe the nature of existence. At that time I assessed myself against certain criteria, such as education, employment, family, friends, faith, and a few others. I think I even had an acronym for them, as I enjoy a good acronym. I am returning to such a self-analysis, expanding on those criteria of my youth, and formalizing them with the help of my new linguistic friend, “ontology”.

I still have not delved into the ramifications of such an introspective interrogation or the deliverables thereof, but I understand enough to know that there is a scale with extremes, and I must set the level that I want my ontology to reach. At one extreme, I see the deliverables of the introspection of my adolesence: a few pages written in ink on paper for the purpose of occasional perusal. At the other extreme, I see a formal semantic language, such as XML, DAML+OIL, OWL, or RDF being used to create the metadata of a classification framework, an undertaking that would no doubt drive me to the sanatorium. No, I haven’t set the level as yet, but it will be somewhere between those two extremes.

One thing that I have decided upon is the platform for the deliverables of my personal ontology. I intend to use a graphical mindmap, which is more efficacious than the printed pages of my first foray into self-assessment, but less dogmatic than a semantic language. Where my former result was only perfunctorily useful, I want my new personal ontology to be functional, accessible, portable, and connected to resources in both my real-world and my online lives. I foresee the deliverable from this ontology being located on a PDA or Tablet PC, despite the current dearth of support for mobile devices at present from my chosen graphical mindmap software, PersonalBrain. I am living in hope that they will soon develop a version that supports mobile devices.