Alternative to the TBL RDF
layer cake model of the Internet ŕ
Community centric service methodology ŕ [home]
This thread is preserving initial discussions on
ontology based modeling of complex social processes.
Paul S Prueitt
The last few days have been productive for me. How to express? A process model might be developed to more easily convey from one person to another person information about "what has happened". With only the written word, I must leave much unsaid.
I envision a time in the near future where the community of computer scientists will open the doors to universal knowledge computing. [1] My current communication, this morning, is one more attempt to describe this vision in simple terms.
Process models and ontological models are related in a way that community awareness of process models will lead to an increased ability to understand the profound differences between process maps and ontological models of processes. There is a path from process modeling to ontological modeling.
What would be possible given a “Digital-Colleges” effort and a clear success in the community college community in California? Our past experience opens doors in ways that are truly remarkable. First, we have a work history that reveals the difference between Software as a Service (SaaS) and product based IT marketing.
From this work effort we recognize that schools, colleges and universities are not business processes; they are social processes that happen to use accounting and bureaucratization processes to keep the doors open.
With this specific challenge, related to community college process mapping, comes a perfect opportunity, if we approach the future with no grievances. Let me again restate how I see the opportunity.
The available process mapping software is designed to provide software as a service to communities like those involved in education. The nature of education provides the stage for proving a technology I have designed over and over again, and partially implemented. If this technology can be delivered in support of the community college districts in California the technology can also be delivered to larger markets. The scale of market deployments is not large because I wish to make a business case for investment in my work. The scale of the markets is large because of the nature of past absence of focus in the information technology community, as discussed in the White Paper.
The purpose of education is not to preserve the institutions; but this preservation of the integrity of the institution has become a huge force in how the educational institutions function today. One can see the themes related to the protection of institutional integrity in the academic literatures that all community college presidents, and most governing board members, are familiar with.
This force is one that I have experienced acutely. The complexity can be over come by strengthening the integrity of the institutions by returning control over rule making to the faculty. I now see how to change the nature of the educational institution; and with your help an entirely positive change will occur.
There is a positive side to the preservation instinct of the institutions of learning. This positive side now presents the greatest opportunity for our partnership.
The institutions of learning have resisted the imposition of a rule making system imposed from the outside. In each location the means to resist has been a creative process, one that created the observed high degree of uniqueness in each case. Each college, each school, and each university sees itself as absolutely unique in all of the essential elements, particularly as related to "their" processes. Each department and each administrative unit replicates this perceptual pattern and creates processes that are as different as possible for any potential standard. This variability is an essential part of how departments and administrative units work. There is a tacit recognition of the uniqueness in each situation. This recognition is a positive aspect of the desire to teach about the natures of individual self.
Without understanding the uniqueness of each educational process, one disarms the educator in a battle to overcome a powerful normalization process. This normalization process is, even without the use of process models or ontological models, one that involves individual perception and the individual selection of specific abstractions related to common and shared concepts. I have discussed this process in the context of a reification of web based ontological modeling in recent communications. [63]
Digital-Colleges Inc (when this corporation is formed) has the capability to assist communities in the specification of process mapping that leads to communities based rule formation. The SaaS paradigm is exactly the correct paradigm. Software as a pre-packaged product is the in-correct paradigm.
As the summer approaches am not in a hurry. With the head start that oil painting inventory sales to Visions of Taos have created for me, the summer months coming up will provide sufficient personal income based on art sales. So there is time to put the proper foundation to Digital-Colleges. The work this summer will be focused on Visions of Taos and virtualTaos.
I would like; however, to see a distinct vision for the work with the community colleges in California. Such a vision is likely to need a separate cost center and some means for investors to clearly associate investment with the development of the Digital-Colleges work. A separate cost center is at least a necessity for the background work I propose on ontology-based mediation of community process mapping. We will work out the details.
[1] Prueitt, Paul S (2007) The Resilience Project White Paper URL:
http://www.ontologystream.com/beads/nationalDebate/ResilienceProjectWhitePaper.htm