Excellent I see this as example of relevance of research. (01)
Ravi (02)
(Dr. Ravi Sharma) Senior Enterprise Architect (03)
Vangent, Inc. Technology Excellence Center (TEC) (04)
8618 Westwood Center Drive, Suite 310, Vienna VA 22182
(o) 703-827-0638, (c) 313-204-1740 www.vangent.com (05)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Chris
Partridge
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 12:23 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Time representation (06)
Pat, (07)
I assume that you do not want me to explain fruitfulness as used in the
philosophy of science - there was a pointer in my original email. You
will
find concrete examples galore from science there. (08)
So I will try and give you some from computer systems. There are very
simple
examples which start to they make the point but do not get to the heart
of
the matter. (09)
A colleague (many years ago) was selling a bespoke system to BT (I might
be
wrong about the client). He asked them what currency they wanted the
system
to use. They said GBP. He did not believe them, so he included currency
as a
variable rather than GBP as a constant. Six months later, he was able to
charge them a significant amount of money to enable a few more
currencies.
He did not feel obliged to mention that this took next to no work. (010)
The inverse of this is a joke this side of the Atlantic, that US
computer
systems seem to assume that there is only one currency - USD. (011)
I think we can all come up with examples like this. What these lack
though
is the important ingredient - that the functionality was completely
unexpected. I think this is where ontology (as a picture of reality
comes
in). (012)
In the preface of my book - Business Objects - I note "Furthermore, as
the
users became more familiar with their systems, something remarkable
begins
to happen. The systems seem to have captured the essence of the
business.
We realised this when we found them being used to handle areas that had
not
been envisaged when we built the business model. For instance, on one
project the users found that their re-engineered securities back-office
system could already handle new financial instruments and situations
that
no-one had thought of when the system was built." (013)
What happen here was that we were working with corporate actions, which
because of tax laws, are quite convoluted. After the system was
implemented
we went down to the users to see how things were going. They explained
to
use that it was handling extremely complicated situations really well -
and
described the details. We then got annoyed with them because they had
not
described these particular situations when we were building the ontology
for
the system. We calmed down when we realised there was not a problem. (014)
When we reflected upon this, what we realised is that we had tried (and
succeeded to an extent) in capturing the main features of corporate
actions
- and that the new (unrecognised) situations were just (very) unfamiliar
combinations of familiar features. (015)
In our work on re-engineering legacy systems, we find we can monitor
this
(this is also described in the book). One re-engineers the legacy system
in
chunks, if patterns/features that arise in one chunk are fruitful, they
show
up in unfamiliar ways as you use them in successive chunks. (016)
On the face of it, it seems right to say that a system needs to be fit
for a
particular purpose (and only that purpose). However, this assumes that
we
can define the purpose in the detail needed to implement it. The history
of
most computer systems (probably most systems) would tend to show that
this
assumption is false. In that case, the design needs to be, as far as it
can
be, for the unforeseen situations. One way of doing this is to try and
make
the design reflect what is actually happening reasonably accurately -
one
way of testing this is to see how fruitful the design is. (017)
Has this been concrete enough for you? (018)
Regards,
Chris (019)
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Pat Hayes [mailto:phayes@xxxxxxx]
>Sent: 24 January 2008 16:44
>To: [ontolog-forum]
>Cc: Chris Partridge
>Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Time representation
>
>At 9:04 AM +0000 1/24/08, Chris Partridge wrote:
>
>>....It seems to me when designing computer
>>systems (and the ontologies to support them) that we need to be
sensitive
>to
>>the issue of fruitfulness.
>
>Chris, I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Can you
>make it a little more concrete?
>
>Pat Hayes
>--
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