Demand Side Learning

Use of ontological and process modeling
representation

Simple explanation: Ontological modeling is relative new means to model complex abstractions often related to military or business structure. Process models that are linked to an ontological model has been the subject of research, and this research has not resolved the core concerns.

History: Ontological modeling may have first been associated with computing in the classified parts of the machine translation research conducted at Georgetown University starting in 1944. John Sowa used the term "ontology" to refer to a machine based representation of aspects of reality in around 1958. There are two branches of ontological science. The first branch was heavily funded by DARPA and picked up both KIF (Knowledge Interchange Formate) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) formalism. The second is the topic map standard. Process modeling has been difficult in both formalism. Process models may sometimes use colored Petri nets.

Nature of first principles:

Ontological models may play, in computing systems, the role that cognitive structure plays in natural systems. The computing system is an abstraction, one that is a product of the human mind's ability to form abstraction. It is thus possible to specify an ontological models that do not correspond to reality, but which my appear to have this correspondence. Process models are a whole lot more difficult to define and to maintain a correspondence to natural reality.

Ontological models are produced via an induction of proposed class and instance construction. This is called a reification of the particular instances into universals.

Functions provided by ontological and process models:

The collective development of models has served humanity well. The cultural heritage includes most notably the formalism of mathematics, and of the many notational systems and conventions in the physical sciences. Ontological modeling extends this heritage and is beginning to supply real cultural value.

One of the functions we anticipate is as a controller for community based collaboration. The individual actions may be represented in a form that allows a synthesis and from this synthesis a topic map or a KIF/RDF type ontology. The synthesis technology is called "semantic extraction". An example of such a system is designed by Prueitt for use in mapping all commodity transactions across national borders. *<*>