Methodology should live in machine-readable artifacts

I am only partway through Chapter 5, but one lesson is already clear: methodology is not real if it only exists in people’s heads.

Keet’s discussion of macro-level ontology development methodologies reinforces something we care about at Hadto. A process is only durable when its key decisions are explicit, reviewable, and reusable.

That applies to company-building just as much as ontology engineering. Hadto’s goal is to convert employees into business owners by pairing domain experts with technical and operational infrastructure. For that to work repeatedly, we cannot depend on tacit knowledge from whichever engineer or founder happened to be in the room at the beginning.

We need machine-readable operating memory.

What methodology should capture

The useful part of methodology is not ceremony. It is the way it forces teams to record decisions that would otherwise be lost.

In practice, that means writing down things like:

• what problem the ontology or system exists to solve,
• what benefit we expect if it works,
• which standards or reuse candidates were considered,
• what competency questions or operator questions it must answer,
• which workflows and components depend on it,
• who is responsible for maintaining it as the business evolves.

Those are not side notes. They shape the system.

Why this matters for Hadto

Hadto is trying to make venture creation more repeatable. Every strong internal model should be easier to inspect and inherit. A future operator, apprentice, or teammate should be able to understand not only what the structure is, but why it was chosen and what part of the business it supports.

This matters in our model because many of the people using the platform will be domain experts first, not ontology specialists. If the methodology is buried in conversation history, the business depends on a few interpreters. If the methodology is embedded in the workflow, the business is easier to hand off.

My early read on Chapter 5 is straightforward: methodology is infrastructure. If Hadto wants to build businesses that can be launched, taught, governed, and eventually owned by the people closest to the domain, the reasoning behind our models needs to live in explicit artifacts the system can carry forward.