The Second School, ontologyMapping thread

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Communication from Paul Prueitt to SOA-CoP and others.

For you consideration and comment:

Ontologystream Inc is following the lesions learned and best practices in the (U.S.) federal IT space, as expressed in a high level community synthesis over SOA (service oriented architecture), including the SOA-Reference Model [1]

We have been part of this community for 16 years. During this time, information technology has continued to be oriented to vendor communities and to a first generation of foundational principles. Meanwhile, there is growing evidence that some aspects of information technology may not, in its current form, fulfill hopes.

In our opinion, the reference model reflects two lessons learned.

1) The origin of design of computer information structure does not reflect an interdisciplinary point of view.

2) The current viewpoint has been constrained by fundamental limitations to the relational database model and to classical information theory.

The reference model builds a conceptual foundation for viewing services as events, having consequences and being embedded in real world effects. All to often, our current technology sees services as isolated point-to-point financial transactions. Another way to describe existing technology is that the information model is static, and lacking of a process model.

Historical periods all come to a close. The past thirty years has seen an expectation that society would move into a new age where individual human values would be easier to achieve. This expectation has only partially been realized. Historical events have brought with them the dangers of terrorism, poverty and limited nuclear wars. Our national debt has grown to a staggering burden on our children and grand children. Some see the current situation as religious in nature and look to End-Of-The-World scenarios. On the other hand, most American citizens see hydrogen, nano, bio and information technologies that are not being used properly. We ask, why not move forward with the adoption of these kinder more gentle technologies? We want to achieve a positive future.

Will service orientation move us in this anticipation? There are two possibilities, that services will be defined as in the reference model as events within processes, or merely as point interactions within economic engines.

We are able to celebrate a new synthesis that explicitly acknowledged the limitations of classical information theory and IT-orientation. It is just happening now, within the last few months, that truly significant conceptual breakthroughs are occurring within key social discussions. The breakthroughs are cultural not technical. How we see digital information is shifting. The current crisis has focused our attention on how we regard individual rights within our form of governance. The key, many believe, is to shift the origin of digital information structure from IT to community. The breakthrough is the result of the current focus on service orientation. One sees political leadership taking this position, and this political leadership is reflected in the U.S. federal CIO Council.

The current high-level synthesis is all about the nature of a service, both of the type offered by pure automated technology and the type offered by one human to another human during something like a conversation. These are the transaction spaces that Prueitt writes about in a short paper “Compression to Patterns” [2]

[2] Prueitt, Paul Stephen (2006) “Compression to Patterns. URL : http://www.secondschool.net/beads/ontologyMapping/55.htm