I just recently attended a meeting about something that many people are beginning to hear about but which most people do not understand — Ontology for Big Systems.

Even the words describing the outcome of meeting are misleading: Summit and Communique. A summit is usually a global meeting of world leaders and a communique is usually a short statement for the public and press. This year’s communique is 11 pages long, which has grown from previous years: 2006 – 1, 2007 – 4, 2008 – 8.4, 2009 – 8.4, 2010 – 8.6, and 2011 – 8 pages.

Ontology has two definitions — one from philosophy and another computer science. I won’t even bother you with their definitions because the Intelligence Community prefers to use the word Knowledge Base instead to describe a collection with a very large number of documents that can be analyzed and searched “for more needles in bigger haystack.” Keep reading →