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• Continuing "What makes for a "good" model?"

  In my last post (I was told that some people's heads exploded when reading it :-) ), I talked about some fundamental modeling concepts and how they help to define classes and their inheritance. The 3 concepts (defined by Guarino and Welty's work on OntoClean) Read More... Posted Tuesday, December 16, 2008 7:18 PM by Andrea Westerinen | 1 Comments Filed under: Models

• What makes for a "good" model/ontology?

  Recently, I have been reading about models/ontologies - their development, formal analysis, mapping/merging, and similar concepts. Being geeky, I was drawn to the book, "The Handbook of Ontologies" (ISBN 3-540-40834-7, published by Springer-Verlag in Read More... Posted Monday, November 17, 2008 12:59 PM by Andrea Westerinen | 1 Comments Filed under: Models, Upper Ontologies

• Human Interactions and Business Processes - OR - "Processes Don't Do Work, People Do"

  The quote above comes from The People Are the Company by John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon Gray. It is a great quote highlighting where business process tooling seems to fail - in handling human interactions and their approaches to processes and problem Read More... Posted Tuesday, September 09, 2008 2:28 PM by Andrea Westerinen | 1 Comments Filed under: Models, Business, BPM

• Interesting book chapter on defining a model ...

  But, it is really a chapter of a book on implementing ITIL (IT's Infrastructure Library) Configuration Management! http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1154763 This particular chapter is about figuring out what types of "configuration items" Read More... Posted Saturday, August 16, 2008 11:27 PM by Andrea Westerinen | 0 Comments Filed under: Models

• Names of the entities in a model - What a rathole!

  While writing my last post on iterative design, I touched on naming entities in the model. I want to take just a few minutes to highlight some guidelines that I use for naming ... Do make the discussion about name choices a significant part of the model Read More... Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 2:28 PM by Andrea Westerinen | 0 Comments Filed under: Models

• Iterative design and combining the knowledge of multiple experts to create a "good" model

  Sorry to be missing-in-action again. But, my daughter's end of the school year, vacations and work seem to have gotten in the way of blogging. Well, I'm back ... :-) The topic of this post deals with creating a "good" model - and the need to combine domain Read More... Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 2:25 PM by Andrea Westerinen | 1 Comments Filed under: Models

• Warning, Will Robinson - Common, general model designs rarely (never) make for a good physical storage scheme

  Here is a guideline that I once wrote and that is often ignored (at least I have no fallacies about my ability to influence people :-)) ... Do not combine data definitions together into a single instantiable entity when an analysis of the managed environment Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 27, 2008 9:10 AM by Andrea Westerinen | 0 Comments Filed under: Models

• Modeling prejudices - Being unduly influenced by perceptions of compositions/decompositions and physical boundaries

  In my previous post on designing a model, I discussed the need to view a problem space broadly and via specific scenarios. Since a model is supposed to serve as a conceptualization and abstraction of a problem space, we have to be careful not to be too Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 27, 2008 8:14 AM by Andrea Westerinen | 1 Comments Filed under: Models

• Modeling based on scenarios and our prejudices

  Back to writing about modeling guidelines .... sorry about the long delay in my posts, but I got caught up in some standardization work that you will be hearing about in the next few weeks :-). I want to talk in this post about scenario-based modeling Read More... Posted Sunday, May 11, 2008 1:39 PM by Andrea Westerinen | 1 Comments Filed under: Models

• Great WSJ article on business and IT

  I'm not sure if folks took note of the Wall Street Journal article, " How to Tap IT's Hidden Potential " from March 10th. Interestingly, I just had a conversation with some IT customers on the question "Is IT a core business of my company?" Opinion was Read More... Posted Sunday, April 06, 2008 4:08 PM by Andrea Westerinen | 1 Comments Filed under: Vocabularies, Models, Business

• Separating contexts into different classes and types (Plus why containment then makes more sense)

  Sorry that I have been MIA over the last week. I had a customer visit out of the country, and then had tons of work to catch up on ... Let me return to my thread on modeling guidelines. A good design separates out different conctexts and aspects into Read More... Posted Sunday, April 06, 2008 10:03 AM by Andrea Westerinen | 1 Comments Filed under: Models

• Why Create a Model?

  Obviously, to solve a problem. But, what is that problem? Is it specific or general? Is the model to represent what has to go into a database or be manipulated by code now , or to simplify a complex domain in order to understand it? In the business space, Read More... Posted Friday, March 21, 2008 1:16 PM by Andrea Westerinen | 1 Comments Filed under: Models, Semantic Web, Upper Ontologies, Business

• Modeling as "General Systems Thinking"

  IMHO, one of the best books on modeling never uses the words, "object-oriented" or "UML" or even "inheritance" (at least that I can remember). It was written by Gerald Weinberg and originally published in 1975. Just recently, the "Silver Anniversary Edition" Read More... Posted Sunday, March 09, 2008 12:16 PM by Andrea Westerinen | 0 Comments Filed under: Models

• Semantics versus Renderings

  Another way to think about the title is semantics versus database/UML/... renderings. For me, "semantics" is not the structure or representation of data (property names, types, …) but the meanings, usages and conceptual hierarchies. An example is the Read More... Posted Wednesday, March 05, 2008 12:13 PM by Andrea Westerinen | 3 Comments Filed under: Models, Semantic Web, Business

• Programming versus Modeling

  I often find myself struggling to define what I do. "Solving world hunger" (in the "world" of common models and ontologies) - is one description, although it is a bit vague and altruistic. I had a much easier time of it when I was a programmer. Then, Read More... Posted Monday, March 03, 2008 11:30 PM by Andrea Westerinen | 1 Comments Filed under: Models