Ontological Prisms

Making sense from light (Isaac Newton, source unknown)

Holistic approaches are confronted with an intrinsic conundrum: how to figure out a whole without presenting the elements ? Prisms and kaleidoscopes may provide an answer.

Kaleidoscopes are contraptions that use geared mirrors to diffract the light of objects and reveal repeating patterns. Ontological prisms apply the same principle to the decomposition and recomposition of symbolic representations in terms of data, information, and knowledge.

Ontological Prism

Language, Intelligence, Knowledge

The primary objective of the kaleidoscope series is to explore the architecture and momentum of knowledge along different perspectives: individual or collective, implicit or explicit, human or digital:

Enterprise Architecture

Modeling Templates

Attempts like Schema.org to build commons of modeling templates have been hampered by an outdated flat data modeling paradigm and two major caveats:

  • Rigid, comprehensive, and detailed descriptions that makes no difference between environments, organization, and systems 
  • A blind eye to change as part and parcel of enterprise architecture governance, inducing an indiscriminate representation of engineering stages and artefacts life cycles

These issues can be overcome with Ontological prisms that introduce a built-in distinction between facts (data and percepts), categories (information and reason), and concepts (ideas, values, intents, and judgments); these distinctions can be neatly aligned with two established modeling paradigms:

  • Conceptual, logical, and physical models
  • Computation independent, Platform independent, and Platform specific models

Yet, contrary to these layered perspectives, ontological prisms integrate the three dimensions and ensure their interoperability.

  • Organisation
  • Role
  • Party
  • Contract
  • Account
  • Reservation
  • Project

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