Today someone asked what The Portable Consultant knew about Hyperion, the “Business Performance Management Software” company.

Now, I’d heard the name and seen some presentations in relation to their financial solutions for corporate governance and regulatory compliance, but I thought I should have another look at their web site before I replied to the email. In doing so I stumbled across an article that began with the following fascinating words:

“In the aboriginal language of Dyirbal, ‘Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things’ is one of four general categories of objects in the world.”

Wow…

The article is entitled Structured Text and Unstructured Data [update: now only available at Internet Archive- here] and it very quickly gets into categorization, textural data mining, ontologies, and similar issues…

“The Dyirbal language uses four basic categorizations for all things:

I. Bayi: (human) males; animals
II. Balan: (human) females; water; fire; fighting
III. Balam: nonflesh food
IV. Bala: everything not in the other classes.

Let’s examine how they categorize and why:…”

Most of the time I’m more concerned with practical matters… such as whether the ECM vendors responding to my RFP really have an open and extensible architecture. But sometimes I like to ponder the wider issues of information architecture and knowledge management. It’s not that I’m expert in those areas, but I wouldn’t mind being a student again. If I were a student, I wouldn’t mind having this article’s author as a teacher. He, or she, knows how to grab your attention and stir your imagination.

The Dyirbal language strikes me as so poetic. It reminds me of a Star Trek story, Episode 2/Season 5 – Darmok, featuring an alien race who could not be understood because they spoke in metaphors. The point being that, to differing extents, so do we all.

When I google^TM “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things” I come up with this book by George Lakoff on Amazon. Wikipedia tells me the sad fact that there are only about five speakers of the Dyirbal language left in Australia.

My “take away” was the article summary which states:

“In the future, more companies will realize the need for extending their Business Performance Management solutions with ECM and textual data mining. Partnerships and interfaces with textual mining companies and ECM vendors will increase.”

I think I understand that… and the Dyirbal classification of Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.
-pmh