Why I Picked the Most Impenetrable Ontology I Could Find
If a comprehension tool can make DMTF's Common Information Model legible, everything easier comes for free. So that's where I started.
Pick the Hardest Thing First
When you build a tool to make something understandable, there’s a temptation to test it on something that’s already pretty clear. I did the opposite. The proving ground for Emic is DMTF’s Common Information Model: about 1,648 classes describing enterprise IT management, written by a standards committee, for implementers. If the tool could make CIM legible, everything easier would come for free.
The right stress test for a comprehension tool is the thing you least want to read.
Meet Storage Volume
Take a concept from CIM called Storage Volume. It isn’t exotic: it’s the formal name for something close to a disk you can mount. The standard’s definition opens by explaining that a Storage Volume is a kind of Storage Extent published for use outside its scoping system, then descends, fast, into SCSI peripheral device type codes (0h, 4h, 5h, 7h, Eh), stream devices, and naming namespaces. Somewhere in there it reads, verbatim, “In these case,” a typo that has presumably survived in the published standard for years, because almost no human reads this prose. Machines do.
That’s the wall. The information is correct, precise, and ratified by the people who actually run this domain. It is also nearly unreadable to anyone arriving new.
The CIM spec isn’t badly written. It’s written for people who already know, which is the one audience that doesn’t need it.
The Design Decision
The obvious move would be to replace the spec with a friendlier summary. That’s the wrong move. The verbatim definition is the ground truth, the emic source, and throwing it away would defeat the entire point of the project.
So Emic does both, in a deliberate order. The concept page leads with a plain-language summary: what Storage Volume is, in a few sentences a newcomer can hold in their head. Below that, collapsed and clearly labeled “Official definition,” sits the verbatim DMTF text, typo and SCSI codes intact.
Lead with the translation. Keep the original one click away. Never pretend the translation is the source.
Why the Order Matters
Put the spec first and you lose the reader on sentence two. Put the summary first and only the summary, and you’ve built another secondhand account, the exact etic noise this project exists to avoid. The ordering is the argument: a readable way in, with the authoritative source always within reach and never overwritten.
See it on the Storage Volume page: the plain summary on top, the real DMTF definition waiting underneath.
The Takeaway
The Takeaway: I chose CIM because it’s the hardest ontology I could find, and the hard part isn’t the size, it’s the prose. Emic’s answer is to translate without discarding: a plain summary to get you in, the verbatim spec kept honest underneath. Everything else in this series is built on that one decision.