Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
An explicit, structured description of what a domain is made of: the types of object that exist, what characterizes them, what connects them, what is always true about them, and the words by which they are designated.
Full definition
The word belongs first to philosophy, then to an established technical field — dedicated languages, engines that deduce conclusions from given rules, associated standards.
In the articles on this blog, it designates the application of that description to a piece of software, in a deliberately poor form: one text card per business object, linked to the others. Applied to a product, it answers five questions — what the product is made of (the objects and their special cases), what characterizes them (the properties), how they connect (the links, each named by a verb), what is always true (the rules), what they are called (the words, in every language and on the ground). Those five boxes also serve as an admission filter: whatever fits in none of them has no business in the framework.
Field usage rarely keeps the learned word: people say "the framework", "the product model", "the cards".
Usage in the field
It comes into play wherever you seek to make a product queryable without opening the code: answering support and pre-sales questions, framing a change entrusted to an agent, deriving test cases, taking stock of translations, qualifying a customer report.
Synonyms and variants
Object framework, domain model, product model, "the cards".
Not to be confused with
- Glossary entry — a note that stabilizes one word at a time, to make it usable in decisions and deliverables. An ontology contains a lexicon, but the links between objects count there as much as the definitions.
- Database schema — the organization of data according to technical constraints of storage and integrity; its tables don't map one to one onto business objects.
- Product documentation — a narrative intended for a human reader, organized by journey or by feature, with no queryable structure.
- Gap — a divergence between what the product does and what it should do; it is recorded apart from the description, which describes reality alone.
Examples
A "Sales Order" card: a one-sentence definition, special cases (urgent order, standing order), properties (a status among four values), links (placed by a customer, contains lines), rules ("an invoiced order receives no more lines"), lexicon (order, sales order, pedido, "deal" at customers').
Ambiguities / debates
For many the word evokes the field's formal apparatus, which makes the work look out of reach; used here, it presupposes neither a dedicated language nor an inference engine. Conversely, practitioners of the field would hold that a text card with no formalism isn't yet an ontology.