Going Emic
LEARNING A TECHNICAL DOMAIN THROUGH ITS OWN CATEGORIES
Building Emic (an explorer that makes formal ontologies navigable) and the ethnographic idea underneath it: the fastest way into an unfamiliar domain is to read how it describes itself. A build story with the numbers, and an honest account of what broke.
"Etic is what people say about a field. Emic is how the field describes itself."
The Insider's View
Learning a Domain From Its Own Categories
The hardest part of cross-industry research is learning a new field fast. There are two ways in, and one of them is built from the domain's own words.
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.
Building the Explorer
Shipping a Triplestore App With No Server
On paper Emic is a database application with four moving parts. In production it's a folder of static files. Here's how the backend got compiled away.
Teaching a Graph to Rank Itself
A thousand-node ontology is a hairball until you ask it the right questions. Three graph algorithms and one design lesson turn it into a map.
The Org Chart vs. the Kinship
Every ontology declares how it's organized. Its concepts have an actual shape that's often different. You can measure the gap, and CIM's is wide.
Field Notes
The $95 Education of an LLM Cache
Pre-writing 6,000 field notes with an LLM cost more than the plan said and taught more than expected, including which model quietly narrates its own prompt.
What an Ontology Explorer Taught Me
I set out to build a tool that explains ontologies. I ended up building one that's careful about how it explains them, and that was the harder, better project.