Alternative to the TBL RDF
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Community centric service methodology à [home]
This thread is being extended starting this date to preserve the initial
discussions on ontology based modeling of complex social processes.
Paul S Prueitt
Digital-Colleges product development plan
Revised from the Jan 2007 version on March 24th 2007
The software development framework
Our framework is based on a simplification of .NET and J2EE frameworks. As in all common software development frameworks, an object factory is part of our software development framework. The framework also handles other functions such as intercomponent messaging and security. Our software framework has a unique property related to the open nature of process modeling as well as the issue of over-the-horizon transparency.
The new Digital-Colleges service is to rely on a software product that uses a mature Appian model building and simulation environment, the Digital-Colleges service framework, the kx database, and web-service based interface. Appian is a next generation process simulation environment having the kx data engine. This engine has special properties that allow real time very high volume throughput. In addition to high throughput, the kx data engine supports a next generation high volume transaction engine based on special properties.
The process of bureaucratization is very much of interest to college administrators, staff and faculty. Digital-Colleges marketing materials are being developed with the college president and board members as the intended audience. [1] Colleges bureaucratize processes under ever changing conditions. [2]
College presidents and board members have the proper overview to see multiple viewpoints, and to understand why modeling process must be open and must provide transparency. Presidents and board members also communicate within a community on issues of governance.
At senior administrative levels there is the authority to create an intellectual scope that illuminates the conversion of bureaucratic process from paper-based to electronic systems. Using a literature review of current and recent PhDs in educational governance, the intellectual scope is couched in governance and mission statements familiar to college presidents and board members. The role and nature of education is revealed as being the center of an information science paradigm based on openness and transparency.
Grounding this intellectual scope in scholarship familiar to senior administrators and to college faculty sets up a unique situation whereby the Digital-Colleges service platform becomes the instrument for the specification and adoption of an international standard for services in educational process. [3] OASIS standards generally take between 18 and 24 months from initial proposals to final adaptation. Digital-Colleges founders understand the standards process.
A work plan has been outlined to bring knowledge elicitation from early adopters of our software platform into an OASIS specification.
The intellectual scope that illumines current realities is based on systems theory and on social theory.
The primary environments for college operations are social, economic and historical. In all these environments one observes difficulty in how current generation IT services colleges. A continual and natural evolution of the bureaucracy is required.
One also observes an overall absence of understanding why the conversion of paper based processes to electronic aided process fails.
A constant changing of rules and procedures has roots in everyday activities arising out of locally controlled decision making. The control over the bureaucracy can be maintained as long as paper forms and processes based on paper are designed locally. Transparency is developed and maintained on only a part of the overall set of processes. Information stovepipes develop and re-develop. This localized process is fully and reasonably justified by the prerogatives commonly granted as part of educational philosophy.
Typical software design for education has a design process that deploys information structure developed by a software engineering community that is often ill prepared to understand the high degree of variation and change natural to educational processes.
Openness is provided by direct end user human design of variations and exceptions. The individual does not have to see over the horizon but when there is time and desire, an overview of the individual’s process and how this process interacts with all other process is immediately available.
The social complexity is made transparent.
The business model for Digital-Colleges is based on an existing dialog within the scholarly community about the nature of bureaucratization in complex social environments. The scope is global, open to every aspect of any process that is created within any institution that is involved in education. With such a scope, Digital-Colleges must have tools that are independent of operating system and development tools. These tools will be designed and developed based on open standards.
The business model provides subscription services using an Aspects Framework having four aspects, one of those being the software development framework. The other three are a lines-of-business framework, a process-model framework and a topic-model framework. [4] The software development framework provides openness to process definition. Using process and topic models, this definition is made by college administrators, staff and faculty.
The software framework was initially developed as part of the Digital-College experience. Using Digital-College, lines of business are developed by community actions in the definition of characteristic web services both within a single institution and across multiple institutions. The Aspects Framework coordinates these actions.
A service architecture based on OASIS, ISO and W3C open standards is to be developed to reflect the OASIS SOA Reference Model, U.S. Federal Enterprise Architecture, and will be proposed as an open standard for services in education.
The schools, colleges and universities exist within a socially complex ecosystem. This ecosystem defines constraints on education through legislative intent, funding partitioning and social philosophy. The ecosystem has processes that are constantly defining and re-defining transactions, some which are precisely defined and some which are vaguely defined. The Open Standard for Services in Education (OSSE) will provide greater transparency on all aspects of process definition and fulfillment, both in individual cases and as aggregated archetypal information.
Our software development framework supports the observation of SQL patterns and assists in human-in-the-loop based production of process maps. Two types of processes are represented; the first type is database transactions. As transaction maps are produced, a second set of relational models is developed to provide transparency on how transactions, and groups of transactions, relate to process maps produced by humans.
Workshops involve faculty and staff in an active discussion about bureaucratized processes. For example, a discussion may arise about the relationship between the hiring practices of the college and the traditional role of colleges within our society. These processes are often partially paper transaction based and partially based in electronic transactions.
The key to the Digital Colleges framework is a data object factory. In most software development frameworks the focus is on the design of software components related to the user interface and to services provided by software. The software development framework controls all parts of the software design. In our case the object factory is designed to produce data objects that filters and categorizes those SQL statements that are observed to execute.
Our data object factory produces data objects that live in a SOA (service oriented architecture). The data objects are the means from which services are defined and exchanged during the completion of bureaucratized processes following socially organized rules. SQL statements are transformed into data objects using a vocabulary produced from a listing of the columns in the relevant enterprise database, and a look up table having all relationships observed to have occurred during an observation period.
Our object factory services the design and refinement of processes within colleges. The set of actual relationships required to perform all observed SQL queries is annotated in a table of relationships. If a change in data design develops the table of relationships easily allows modification.
The table of relationships becomes an active metadata repository taken directly from the data model, of the database, and the use patterns of users doing work. Clearly the quality of this metadata repository depends directly the quality of the data model as implemented in the collective tables and relationships within the database. The targeted database is not the college’s databases, these are allowed to be what ever they are. The targeted database in the Digital-Schools data schema, modified to address the college market.
Given any stable set of tables and relationships defined within and between tables, the service framework guides the development of the table of relationships. During an observational period, the table is extended each time a relationship between data is observed in an actual SQL based retrieval and that relationship is not yet in the table of relationships. This is an active measurement process.
Monitoring over the transactions on the relationship table allows support staff to create process maps related to, computer based, service transactions used by the college to complete human resources and payroll functions. These maps are created using a measurement function of our software framework, the Appian process mapping software, a set of templates, and community based workshops.
The actual process map specification requires human awareness and insights. Workshops and the use of a folksonomy tool, the wiki, does measure social complexity. This measurement is expressed in the line-of-business, process-model and topic-model of the Aspects Framework.
Process maps organize information about the transaction space. The proper use of this information identifies use patterns. An iterative refinement is enabled by re-accruing transparency over service processes. This transparency is over both how stakeholders view the bureaucratized process that they wish to achieve as well as patterns of data object usage as observed by the software development framework.
Increased agility from the Digital-College software platform assists college administrations in improving college processes. However, the measurement of processes is empowered by staff and faculty interest and participation. Staff and faculty will see college processes as transparent. Our software-development and lines-of-business aspects transform perception into a bureaucratization mediated by human-in-the-loop electronic model driven transactions.
A living folksonomy is developed using multiple wikis. Digital College helpdesk support staff uses managed knowledge about what other parts of the community are doing to advise college personnel. The helpdesk staff uses process models to talk with college personnel using vocabulary that college staff uses in discussions about specific processes. This discussion and the easy availability of models from other colleges helps the college personnel make decisions about how their particular process will be specified.
Multi-folksonomies are revealed that capture multiple points of view without attempting to force single viewpoints on everyone. For example, a single wiki is developed for each identifiable community of practice, and multiple interpretations of the meaning and nature of processes is defined using college community interaction. Separation of formal models about community viewpoint provides a means to clarify the interests of stakeholders.
Vocabulary and viewpoints are aggregated over multiple college communities and thus forms the basis for observing process patterns over multiple college communities. These patterns are to be discussed by those in PhD programs across the nation with focus on the mission of colleges and universities and governance. An International standard will be proposed as a by-product of this aggregation of vocabulary and viewpoint.
[1] Announcement materials are being drawn up to be sent to all 117 community college presidents in the State of California. This material suggests a series of process mapping workshops. The materials will talk about ontology over an abstraction of the K-12 process maps, as well as new community college process maps. The argument will be made that college participation benefits both the individual colleges as well as assist the development of the public international standard for processes mapping and IT deployments in education (world wide).
[2]
Bureaucracy is a concept in sociology and political science
referring to the way that the administrative execution and enforcement of legal
rules are socially organized. This office organization is characterized by standardized
procedure (rule-following), formal division of responsibility, hierarchy, and impersonal relationships.
[3] Additional information on how this might be accomplished is available from Paul prueitt.
[4] Prueitt, Paul S. (2007) “The Aspects Framework”