by Michael Uschold | Aug 1, 2014 | The Whiteboard
Are you struggling with how to make best use of your company’s knowledge assets that have grown overly complex? Have you wondered how to blend the more informal taxonomic knowledge with the more formal ontological knowledge? This has been a real head-scratcher for...
by Dave McComb | Jul 25, 2014 | Software Architecture
A Playbook you Don’t want to Follow A while back, I was working for a large consulting firm. When I was returning to the US from an overseas assignment, I was allowed to select the city I would return to. I told my boss, who was on the board of this firm, my...
by Dave McComb | Jul 22, 2014 | Semantics and Ontology
The idea of supersumption may solve some common Object Oriented problems. We’ve been doing training in Semantics and Description Logics lately, and have decided it’s worth emphasizing the concept of supersumption. Of course, supersumption is nothing but...
by Dave McComb | Jul 22, 2014 | Semantics and Ontology
What history can teach us about semantics. Lately we’ve been grappling with the issue of how to get a Semantics Inference Engine and a Business Rules Engine to play nice in an Enterprise Architecture. Some long dormant neuron fired and the Treaty of Tordesillas was...
by Dave McComb | Jul 22, 2014 | Semantics and Ontology
System project failures are a well-known part of systems development; however, all the potential risks of planning and executing a project effort are not. This white paper offers heuristic guidelines to help IS managers assess these inherent risk factors before...
by Dave McComb | Jul 22, 2014 | Development
Are there hidden problems with default values in software? Virtually all information systems have “default values.” We put them in our systems to make things easier for the end-users as well as the system itself. As we will investigate in this white paper,...
by Dave McComb | Jul 22, 2014 | Development
Relational databases, relational theory, relational calculus, and predicate logic all rely on a two-value truth. That is, that a given proposition or predicate is either true or false. The fact that the results of the query can be proven to be correct rests on the...
by Dave McComb | Jul 22, 2014 | Software Architecture
Somewhere around 200 items seems to be the optimum number of interrelated things we can deal with at one time, when dealing with complex systems such as computer software. In 1956 George Miller wrote an article for the Psychological Review called “The magic number...
by Dave McComb | Jul 22, 2014 | Software Architecture
An Evaluation of Risk Factors in Large Systems Engineering Projects This article was originally published in the Journal of Information Systems Management, Volume 8, Number 1, Winter 1991. It is reprinted here by permission of the publisher: www.crcpress.com System...
by Dave McComb | Jul 22, 2014 | Software Architecture
Why can’t we deploy software as well we did fifty years ago? The way we build and deploy software is deplorable. The success rate of large software projects is well under 50%. Even when successful, the capital cost is hideous. In his famous “Mythical Man...
