How to – and How Not to – Build Ontologies: The Hard Road to Semantic Interoperability

The digitalisation journey that takes us to semantically seamlessly interoperating enterprise systems is (at the later stages - where ontology is deployed) a hard road to travel. This presentation aims to highlight some of the main hurdles people will face on the digitalisation journey using a cultural evolution perspective. From this viewpoint, we highlight the radical new practices that need to be adopted along the journey. The presentation looks at the concerns this evolutionary perspective raises. For example, evolutionary contingency. It seems clear that if we don’t adapt in the right way, we will not evolve interoperability. While we have some idea of what the practices are, what the trajectory of the journey is. This is not enough, the community also needs find the means to (horizontally) inherit these. The presentation then does a quick tour around so of the new practices that need to be adopted.