Starting the new year with a new post ...

As one of my new year's resolutions, I am firmly committing to finding time to blog ... And to start off, I am taking some ideas from my job (jobs always provide interesting food for thought).

I want to post my thoughts on the qualifications of an ontologist/modeler ... What makes a good modeler?

* Senior developer with experience in different products (and an ability to draw analogies
and see commonalities between the products)
* Ability to discern use cases and create abstractions from basic problem statements
o The ability to solve a single problem with a specific solution is relatively easy, but
the ability to create a generic solution to a set of related problems is much more
valuable and difficult
* Ability to see "systems", determining boundaries and components (for
example, looking at a few trees and abstracting the forest - or - looking at a forest and
determining what is important about the trees)
* Interpersonal and communication skills (the job is really all about understanding
requirements for the ontology/model, learning about the domain and interacting with
subject matter experts)
* Ability and eagerness to learn (about new problems, new areas of work, specific details
that need abstraction, ...)

Not a very specific set of skills or qualifications, but I did start with the assumption that the person is senior, experienced and a great candidate.

What are your thoughts?

Andrea