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Re: [cuo-wg] White Paper

To: "Cory Casanave" <cory-c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "common upper ontology working group" <cuo-wg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: "Flynn, John P." <john.flynn@xxxxxxx>
From: "Brad Cox, Ph.D." <bcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2006 17:35:36 -0500
Message-id: <20061118222610.M40706@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cory; couldn't let this claim go by unchallenged.     (01)

> The government, like any large organization, is a system and 
> parts of that system need to be designed.    (02)

Its absolutely true that government believes this to its very soul. But its
definitely not true for almost all other large organizations, like rain
forests, the distributed organization that feeds lunch to millions of New
Yorkers each day, nor the more localized ones that build everything from
pencils to automobiles to telephone calls.    (03)

Such organizations were never "designed". They "evolved", completely oblivious
to the guiding hand of some almighty nerd. For more along these lines search
for Bionomics on http://virtualschool.edu.    (04)

This is actually the reason I keep yammering on about incentive structures.
Evolutionary systems rely on such structures (based on calorie exchange in
nature) to distinguish success and failure. Govt largely lacks this, and thus
the guiding hand it provides.     (05)

--
Work: Brad Cox, Ph.D; Binary Group; Mail bcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home: 703 361 4751; Chat brdjcx@aim; Web http://virtualschool.edu    (06)


---------- Original Message -----------
From: "Cory Casanave" <cory-c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "common upper ontology working group" <cuo-wg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<bcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: "Flynn, John P." <john.flynn@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Sat, 18 Nov 2006 15:49:56 -0500
Subject: RE: [cuo-wg] White Paper    (07)

> John,
> I don't think we are talking about the same thing.  We are concerned
> with the architectures of the government, not architectures the
> government imposes on others.  The government, like any large
> organization, is a system and parts of that system need to be designed.
> Some parts need to be designed to work with other parts, good
> architecture does that flexibly and without N**2 integration.  These
> architectures need to work together - architectures working together is
> exactly what interoperability is, separately architected systems
> (business or technology systems) coming together on common ground.  "The
> internet" does not "work together" in this way, it is technology
> infrastructure.
> 
> As for as tried and proven approaches, building solid architectures is
> as about as proven as it gets.  Common agreement in a community is
> proven (also known as standards).  Point to point interoperability is
> also proven.  We want to go beyond that, here we have some great
> candidates but I don't see anything as proven.
> 
> As far as LDC and fuzzy architectures, I agree completely.
> 
> -Cory
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: cuo-wg-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:cuo-wg-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Flynn
> Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2006 9:46 AM
> To: 'common upper ontology working group'; bcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Cc: 'Flynn, John P.'
> Subject: Re: [cuo-wg] White Paper
> 
> Cory,
> 
> A typical problem with government designed and managed architectures is
> that they have the potential to represent a lowest common denominator
> (LCD) approach in order to accommodate the interest of all the candidate
> participants. The resultant LCD architectures are so vague that they
> still allow many non-interoperable applications to be developed and
> almost always contain relatively easy to obtain provisions for
> exceptions. It seems that the one architectural standard that has best
> held up over a number of years, gracefully evolved and truly supported
> broad interoperability is the World Wide Web architecture. It was not
> designed or managed by the government.
> Also, it is not proprietary. So, it may be useful to focus on ways to
> extend the proven WWW model, via W3C processes, to accommodate the CDSI
> requirements before branching out to seriously consider other less tried
> and proven approaches.
> 
> John
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: cuo-wg-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:cuo-wg-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> On Behalf Of Cory Casanave
> Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2006 11:21 AM
> To: bcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; 'common upper ontology working group'
> Subject: Re: [cuo-wg] White Paper
> 
> Brad,
> We have been thinking along similar lines but I submit the government
> has to own their architectures, only they have the cross-cutting view
> (or should have).  Contractors can help build these, but the
> architecture asset (as the expression of the enterprise, enterprise
> needs and solutions - business or
> technical) has to be put into the acquisition cycle.   Systems then need
> to
> be built to that architecture is an executable, testable way.  Those
> architectures have to STOP being "for a system" and be "for the
> enterprise".
> SOA makes a great model for these architectures - separating concerns
> and providing the boundaries to build to.  The semantic technologies can
> help here to join and bridge architectures, but you are absolutely
> correct that the core problem is not technical.
> -Cory
> 
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------- End of Original Message -------    (08)

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