Object Aggregation

This chapter describes the information and meanings that emerge from aggregates. It shows how the concepts like containment and subtyping are configured from the concept of location.

Introduction to This Book

This chapter establishes the scope of this book, and introduces the business problem it is trying to solve. The chapter also introduces our approach to engineering business agility and integration by identifying components of knowledge which may be reused in multiple contexts.

The Architecture of Knowledge

This chapter introduces the layered structure of knowledge and describes why chaos rides on the wings of change and adaptation. It tells us how traditional analytical approaches, like functional decomposition, can lead to chaos when the size and complexity of business processes and information systems exceed a critical threshold.

The Whole Shebang

This is the final chapter of the book. It describes the overarching structure of knowledge. This chapter provides an overview of the interactions between the fractured meanings normalized by each metaobject. It shows how the entire scheme is integrated into one unified context, which leads to the concept of Knowledge itself. Wherever knowledge and meaning exist, we will find their generic components configured in this manner.

The Nature of Constraints

This chapter wraps up the discussion by describing how normalized components of information are carved out of inchoate information by constraints, and manifested as objects with specific properties and meanings. It describes the essential identity between a law and its outcome.

Crossing the Chasm

This chapter describes the bridge between business meanings and automated information systems. It describes the information architecture that interfaces computational processes to the business semantic.

Processes, Events, and Temporal Relationships

This chapter describes how structured and unstructured business processes and their properties morph out of relationships, when information on the flow of time is added. It integrates business rules, processes, and inference into a single cogent and holistic information based ontology of meaning, tying, them to business goals and agility. The chapter shows how product and process innovation may be partially automated, and how processes and goals may be engineered to support business agility.

Relationships

The focus of this chapter is on how interactions between objects create new meanings. It develops a model of business rules, and shows how mutability supports innovation. It introduces the rules that support inference and innovation by manipulating the patterns of information that constitute different meanings.

The Pattern at the Root of it All

This chapter describes the concept of a Pattern, and describes why patterns are the basis of knowledge. It establishes the semantics of Pattern, and describes the concept of “information space”, an abstract arena in which patterns of information create meanings. It shows how the concept of measurability is the basis of all meaning, and how meanings are structured by patterns in information space. It also distinguishes a meaning from its physical representation and establishes the identity between objects and patterns. It shows how joining and constraining meanings creates new patterns of information, which lead to new meanings, and hence the ability to configure meanings from other meanings. This is the basis on which components of knowledge are derived in this book, and also in its companions in the series.

Introduction to Structure of Knowledge

This chapter introduces the concept of Metamodel of Knowledge. The chapter: • Defines knowledge and introduces the concept of the atomic rule as the building block of knowledge. • Describes the need for coordinating business knowledge, the difficulty of doing so, and how normalization of knowledge can facilitate its coordination and lead to the development of agile software. • Introduces the concepts that show how knowledge can be normalized and assembled from components. • Introduces the concept of a business process and services as derivatives of business knowledge • Introduces the concept of modeling of behavior. • Introduces the problem of multiple clashing perspectives of reality from which knowledge is assembled.