But were they truly ‘context ontologies’? In his much-cited work about the knowledge-creating enterprise, Nonaka describes context, and with it the concept of ‘ba’ (which roughly means a place, or context in motion), as multifaceted at best and generally volatile. ‘Ba’ is where knowledge is created within the enterprise and where the dialectic process takes place. In another paper that tries to elaborate the concept of context a bit starting from Nonaka’s insights, the authors state that context is inherently personal, although in some cases it intersects with other peoples’ contexts. What we have done at Synergetics, was actually extracting ‘ideal types’ from context, which are types that claim general validity and are shared amongst people. Problem is that this increase in anonymity implies a decrease in fullness of the content.

Just like tacit knowledge becomes more relevant in less formalised situations, perhaps this is the case for the underlying competencies as well. Perhaps it is not possible to formalise the ‘application’ of competencies enough because the ontology engineering lag of such a granular ontology would make it unmaintainable (or rather, unprofitable) and the degree of individuality of context would simply make a context ontology irrelevant on a shared level (because the real grounding of competencies should take place on those non-shared levels which are not on the level of ‘ideal types’).

I guess in the end the question is one of pragmatism: is the (non-shared) level of the individual even relevant for a context ontology? Yes, if you truly want to represent meaningful competencies (where they are really situated). No, if you are happy to compare competency models on the ‘ideal type’ level inter- or intra-organisationally even if it may be somewhat a stretch from what is really going on. But then we arrive once more at the problem of personal interpretation of the models.

The Baekeland programme aims to offer researchers the opportunity to finish a doctoral degree at a Flemish university (or a knowledge institute that works with an academic supervisor) in close cooperation with industry. The programme provides co-financing of individual mandates, including the funding of operational costs associated with the project.

A basic principle of the Baekeland mandates is that on one hand a Flemish company is responsible for co-financing the research project and defining its strategic objectives, whilst on the other hand a Flemish university is responsible for managing the doctorate and granting a degree in accordance with the high Flemish educational quality standards.

The funding is granted by the IWT as a project funding to the applicant company. The company needs to have an agreement with the researcher’s host institution.

This program fills a real void in current funding schemes and offers a means for companies to attract relatively cheap, motivated and smart talent. The importance for innovation in Flanders should not be underestimated, as it will also directly contribute to applicability of research results. In my time at Synergetics, Luk Vervenne and I have talked to the Flemish government on a number of occasions in which we pointed out this void (and apparently we were not the only ones). Glad to see something has been done about that now. More information (in Dutch) about the programme can be found here (PDF).

This properties/functions insight was a valuable lesson for me, as I was back then at the beginning of my research only considering different kinds properties in my semantic product model. Also the value of their dynamics and correlations within an innovation context added a dimension to my research.

Of course, something is missing in the properties/functions story. It is or seems to be ignorant of the fact that there is an 80% product failure rate. One of the factors contributing to this rate is overproduction of course, but also lack of market insight, lack of customisation, and bad market segmentation. What is missing in fact is context: what is the context in which innovations will be used and will they be valuable within this context? Context has to be regarded extremely broad, ranging from Quality of Service to symbolic interaction patters and brand perception. So I included context in the model. I’ll write another post another day to elaborate on this.

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Below are some posts which I imported from my professional blog @ davormeersman.wordpress.com, which I will no longer be updating, so make sure to update your bookmarks. This blog will subsititue the old one.

I’ve also been in touch with Lieven De Marez, an interesting scientist from the University of Ghent, who has a PhD in segmentation forecasting. Although he is the stereotypical scientist that has good paper models, but little computing intelligence (in his work, not his mind, of course), he has developed a Quality of Experience model for ICT applications together with Katrien De Moor that seems to be interesting for the things I’m going. It’s not generic (yet), but maybe with some effort (and EC funding), we could really kick start this.

OTM itself was a great event and really felt like ‘the place to be’ if you’re working in my field. It is a six days, five conference and thirteen workshops event that brings together the sharpest minds in the domains it covers and I can recommend it to everybody. I have been invited to submit a paper to another workshop next year and I will make sure to do that. Although the Algarve was a great location (we were sitting on the beach enjoying the sun in November), I think Mexico will be even better :-)

The reviewers’ comments were tough, but constructive. I still need to perform some work for the camera-ready version, but the bottom line is I will present the paper at the conference and it will be published in the Springer proceedings.

In this paper I introduce the concept of market driven product ontologies, which are used to incorporate market information into the knowledge system of a company as well as exchange it with other value cycle partners with minimal loss of information.

In my vision, one would integrate market research output data with the ontological backbone of an organisation in such a way that it is relevant to every aspect of the product development process, thus permitting the information to travel deep down into the fibre of an organisation, contributing to product innovation, competence development and relevant social interaction.

The Doctoral Consortium should be a useful platform, as I will get ample feedback and input for my research in motion. I’ve already received some good feedback from the right people.

Anyway, the paper is my box on the right.