Broadening Ontologization Design: Embracing Data Pipeline Strategies

TL;DR

This paper broadens the understanding of ontologization design by exploring data pipeline strategies and evolutionary perspectives, highlighting new practices enabled by digitalization and their strategic importance.

Contribution

It introduces a wider design space for ontologization, emphasizing data pipelines and evolutionary context as key to innovative practices.

Findings

Data pipelines enable new ontologization practices.

Evolutionary perspective clarifies the role of digitalization.

Outlier methodology bCLEARer exemplifies these concepts.

Abstract

Our aim in this paper is to outline how the design space for the ontologization process is broader than current practice would suggest. We point out that engineering processes as well as products need to be designed and identify some components of the design. We investigate the possibility of designing a range of radically new practices implemented as data pipelines, providing examples of the new practices from our work over the last three decades with an outlier methodology, bCLEARer. We also suggest that setting an evolutionary context for ontologization helps one to better understand the nature of these new practices and provides the conceptual scaffolding that shapes fertile processes. Where this evolutionary perspective positions digitalization (the evolutionary emergence of computing technologies) as the latest step in a long evolutionary trail of information transitions. This reframes ontologization as a strategic tool for leveraging the emerging opportunities offered by digitalization.