A Hidden Power of Ontology Charts from Affordances to Environmental States

Abstract : Ontology Charts are a powerful model element in Organisational Semiotics used to depict a stable and precise view of a business system. They show affordances and ontological dependencies as, respectively, nodes and links between them. Spite their apparent simplicity, they are many times hard to create. In this paper we refer to some common issues regarding the creation of Ontology Charts. Nevertheless, they have a hidden power of defining anchors for a stable information system supported by the affordance concept. In NOMIS – a NOrmative Modelling of Information Systems – affordances are transformed to states and environmental states and used as stable state paths within an information system. This paper shows how this transformation takes place and some advantages and possibilities of using it.