Jack:
OK, I think I understand what you are saying so I will further discuss
--- 1) The concept of natural systems versus artificial systems
--- 2) The fact that humans are natural systems that are involved in the process.
Item 1: A system is defined as having two parts, A) objects and B) relationships.
Both natural and artificial systems have these two parts.
Part B (the relationships) are always determined by people.
In natural systems the objects that the relationships are mapped upon are not artifacts of human activity. For example the solar system has a set of objects (sun and planets) which are naturally occurring items. The relationship that is mapped over these objects is placed there by humans. The solar system has had a number of relationships mapped over the set of objects over a period of time.
The relationship in all systems types is constructed by the human mind.
The difference between natural and artificial systems is determined by the origin of the objects in the system, not the origin of the binding system relationship.
Item 2: In Warfield's approach the structuring relationship was a single, transitive real world relationship conceived by humans. All of the applications of the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) that I saw attached to a Warfield approach developed system objects (graph nodes) that were abstract representations of how people involved in the process viewed the environment of interest. The ISM system is designed to address the limitations of humans but the ISM system is the tool being used to analyze the "current system of interest."
Any way I think we agree on the main issues.
Have fun,
Joe
On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 3:16 PM, Jack Ring <jring7@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Joe, I understand your formulation. I simply do not understand the justification for the supposed continuum, specifically who said those things on the leftmost end of the continuum are systems? Seems to me 'system' is a man devised concept so anything labeled 'system' is also man-devised thus artificial even though the ingredients may be quite natural.
I think Warfield's Discovery partition stressed clarifying the problematic situation and the underlying problem system regardless of whether the ingredients of the problem system were natural or artificial. In fact, one of his main points, cognitive overload leads to underconceptualization, deals directly with 'natural' ingredients.
What am I missing?
Jack
ps. topology or typology?
On Feb 1, 2012, at 3:40 PM, joseph simpson wrote: Jack:
Missed this one until now.
The concepts of natural systems and artificial systems are viewed as inhabiting different ends of a continuous scale.
So on one end of the scale there are only systems that are populated with "natural objects", at the other end of the scale the are systems populated only with "artificial objects."
In the continuum between these two ends a mix of systems (natural objects and artificial objects) are found.
A mixed system mode is then used when interacting with the mixed systems.
These concepts were not well defined in my last post.
I agree that most current "real problems" are in the mixed system area that is addressed using a mixed systems mode, both discovery and design.
In my view, Warfield's techniques focused mostly on the structuring of abstract, artificial nodes in a given system problem space. The structuring relationship in most cases was fixed.
When the components of a system (objects and relationships) are both abstract and artificial, then the identification and communication of the set of items that fit in each category becomes much more important.
The approach that I have outlined starts to create a well defined topology upon which one can map and consider organizing system concepts.
Have fun,
Joe
On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 5:32 PM, Jack Ring <jring7@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Pretty good. Suggest you consider that in the construct rule the relations may be among the relations as well as among the objects (Weinberg). In other words, relations may be objects, too (as in perspective shift). This is important to systems and may be a challenge to ontologists.
Warfield also proposed the Discovery and Design notion but Discovery was about the problem system (context of the system of interest) whereas Design was about the system of interest. Restricting Discovery to natural systems leaves a gap in discovery of the "real problem" that stakeholders want the system of interest to mediate.
On Jan 29, 2012, at 11:59 AM, joseph simpson wrote: For example three, now consider:
--- "system of (X)"
--- "part of (X)"
Where X can be , laws, games, airplanes, cars, plants.. and so on..
The "system concept" may be viewed as a real world relationship that is used to order or constrain the environment.
Using this basic view, two types of definitions for a system can be constructed as well as two main types of activity for system concepts.
The two definition types are, function (rule) and constructive (rule).
The two main activity types are discovery and design.
The functional rule definition for a system was given previously and is restated here, "A system is a constraint on variety, where the constraint identifies and defines the system of interest."
The construction rule definition for a system is, " A system is a non-empty set of objects and a non-empty set of relationships mapped over these objects and their attributes."
Humans tend to use the concept of a system for two main activities:
--- Discovering, documenting and discussing natural systems (systems not constructed by man).
--- Designing, documenting and discussing artificial systems (systems constructed by man).
Johannes Kepler's laws of planetary motion that describe the behavior of solar system under the defining constraints of natural physical forces is one example of using the system concept in the discovery mode.
The Wright brothers are an example of the application of the system concept used in the design mode.
These modes of application have different approaches, methods and techniques.
Mixing these modes may generate a high degree of semantic conflict.
Have fun,
Joe
On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Christopher Spottiswoode <cms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Joe, Anatoly,
You both make very useful points. Here I highlight just 2 of them:
AL:
> This ontologizing-in-the-large lead to your need to define not only
> ontology-as-algorithm but also communication protocol between ontology
> components that reside in different nodes. I doubt that mantra about
> "federation" is helpful here. If you have web programming (that is in
> essence programming-in-the-large) you speak not about "federating" of
> web-server, load balancer, database, web-page generation, ad banner
> importing, etc. but have another engineering approach (while all that
> software developed by different organizations and reside on different
> computers).
As I shall be describing in some detail later, appropriate architecture
leads to good 'Separation of Concerns', hence reliable and flexible
application modularity while also enhancing the various other qualities
usually sought. That is what a properly ontology-based architecture
should of course produce, and "federation" is a good word to describe
the result at the in-the-large level.
In contrast to what I shall be describing, the conventional web
programming you highlight is complication-inducing rather than
complexity-respecting
JS:
> I suggest that the "binding force" or "binding concept" that forms a
> number of items in to one entity is a key feature.
Yes! That is indeed most strongly the case in the architecture I shall
be describing (or trying once again to describe, lessons hopefully
having been learnt...).
All of which recalls that now very mainstream IS programming precept:
Larry Constantine's "high module cohesion with loose module coupling".
We don't have to reinvent that wheel.
> Have fun,
>
> Joe
Yes thanks, Joe, we sure will!
Christopher
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Joe Simpson
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