This article contains a criticism of logical empiricism. Logical Empiricism has been shaping our thinking in the past century, with influential thinkers like Bertrand Russel and A.N. Whitehead. Usually we are not aware of these influences in a naive assumption that thinking is an objectively validated activity by itself, which of course it isn’t. For activities like business modelling it is imperative to dive into the philosophy of thinking. Why? Because our models will be fundamentally...

Intent We want to be able to grow our domain models. They must be infinitely scalable. Growing an already large model should not be more difficult than a small model. Change comes in two forms: changing existing functionality, or adding new. We want there to be as little difference as possible between the two, regarding testing, validating, and modelling. Also Known As No known current variants of this pattern are known to me. Example A banking system has functioned for years but now an invasive...

The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web – NYTimes.com Vannevar Bush has been referred to on this site, but despite him being Belgian (I am Dutch, which is almost Belgian😀), I never heard of Paul Otlet, who seems to have pre-dated Bush by at least a decade. There is no evidence that Bush knew of Otlet, but seeing that Otlet in his time was rather famous I would not be surprised if that was the case. Read this article about Vannevar Bush to understand the importance...

The recent discussion about the programming paradigm needing an update spanned a number of topics (the discussion is so dense that it could probably make up a couple book chapters). One theme that kept coming up is that the current state of the art in business computing is horrid. Developers need to lead the way in a business revolution As much as I hail the growing insight that existing metaphors to build software are not sufficient or even detrimental, we still are in dire need of new metaphors. David...

For those who attended my presentation (and other interested people of course) on ESUG 2008 about Exploratory Modelling or xM, I collected some references. Slides of the presentation Podcast in which my presentation is discussed (note: no longer available, sorry) Video of the presentation, thanks to James Robertson of Cincom. This site contains several articles related to the subject of my presentation: To read more on the “reverse time pattern” please read Time Inversion Pattern The...