Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology Misinforming Knowledge through Ontology

A fundamental of the formation of virtual organizations, or capturing effective organizational memory is the creation of an ontology. Existing organizational memory software systems uniformly suffer from the problem of initializing the ontology. Another, less recognized, problem of ontologies is their poor record in capturing implicit and informal relationships within and between actors. This paper postulates that previous work on an ecological model of relationships can be applied to bootstrapping an ontology. This model seeks to capture the complexity of relationships using language arising from the areas of ecology which has a long history of dealing with complex relationships.