The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

3.3. Resource Identity

Determining the identity of resources that belong in a domain, deciding which properties are important or relevant to the people or systems operating in that domain, and then specifying the principles by which those properties encapsulate or define the relationships among the resources are the essential tasks when building any organizing system. In organizing systems used by individuals or with small scope, the methods for doing these tasks are often ad hoc and unsystematic, and the organizing systems are therefore idiosyncratic and do not scale well. At the other extreme, organizing systems designed for institutional or industry-wide use, especially in information-intensive domains, require systematic design methods to determine which resources will have separate identities and how they are related to each other. These resources and their relationships are then described in conceptual models which guide the implementation of the systems that manage the resources and support interactions with them.148[Com]

[148][Com] These methods go by different names in different disciplines, including “data modeling,” “systems analysis,” and “document engineering” (e.g., (Kent 2012), (Silverston 2000), (Glushko and McGrath 2005). What they have in common is that they produce conceptual models of a domain that specify their components or parts and the relationships among these components or parts. These conceptual models are called “schemas” or “domain ontologies” in some ...