Ontologies and Cognitive Maps: Transactional Order Creation through Disambiguating Cognition

Abstract

The sensemaking perspective favors action and practice over high level formal structures, such as in planning. It does so by defining sensemaking processes as an iterative exchange and refinement of cognitive structures, which leads to a rationalization of past events. Cognitive maps can be used as a means for displaying such sensemaking processes graphically and for analyzing these. In their classical form they are hand-drawn artifacts. More recent approaches allow their creation by using desktop software for manual mapping. In distributed organizing, cognitive maps need to be expressed in a suitable data format. Ontologies and adjacent technologies offer this. Ontologies bring technology, tools, and methods allowing for the large-scale elicitation, sharing, and computation of the conceptualizations of agents in distributed organizing.