This Developing Thin Slices report provides a technical description of the process at the heart of the Thin Slices Methodology with the aim of providing a common technical resource for training and guidance in this area. As such it forms part of the wider effort to provide common resources for the development of the Information Management Framework.
It focuses on the process at the core of the Thin Slices Methodology. In particular, it identifies a requirement for a minimal foundation for these kinds of processes. In the companion report, Top-Level Categories (Partridge, forthcoming), the foundation adopted by the Information Management Framework is described. Together, the two reports cover the details of the developing thin slices process.

This report identifies the top categories that characterise the top-level ontology that will underpin the Information Management Framework’s Foundation Data Model (where top categories exclusively and exhaustively divide the world’s entities by their fundamental kinds or natures). With these in place, the IMF’s top-level ontology has been characterised.

A thin slices approach (described in Developing Thin Slices (Partridge, forthcoming)) has been adopted for the development of the foundation data model. The category structure described in this report is being used as the foundation for that process. With these categories in place, that process has a firm foundation.

In various disciplines, when working on larger projects there is a tradition of thinking in terms of an architecture (E.g. Enterprise / Systems / Software Architecture).

Firstly a meta-methodological point; this suggests a good methodology for approaching large ontology projects should have an architectural component.

Here architecture is used in a loose sense, there is extensive discussion on what exactly an architecture is, which is not directly relevant to the points made. Agreeing it used in a loose sense avoids this – however interesting a rabbit hole it seems.
The points are illustrated the points with examples from the development and application of top ontologies such as BORO, IDEAS and MODEM.

In the first of this two-part Executive Update series,1 I took a swipe at the currently accepted approach to systems development. My argument was that if a system is to adequately support a business, the information it handles must be rigorously derived from the business itself. By producing a process model, then an information model, then a data model, and then handing it all over to an implementation team, we can end up somewhat removed from the reality of the business. The people responsible for each of these steps in the chain usually don’t have a good understanding of each other’s specialities, and the result can be “Chinese whispers.”

I also noted there are a number of legacy systems out there that are decades old and attempts to replace them with modern technology have failed. The fact that the old systems are so useful is perhaps more of a mystery than the fact that today’s technology seems to offer nothing to beat them. Another trait of the these old systems that have stood the test of time is that they (mostly) seem to have been developed inhouse, in the days before there was a specialist IT function in the business. This is even stranger. How can a system that’s 20 to 30 years old and developed by a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs outperform the latest technology, designed and developed by highly specialized information technologists and business analysts?

We aim to establish that there is at least one role for constructionalism in applied ontology by giving the case history of an early example of a case where the foundations of a top-level ontology are constructionally refactored. What we have called ‘taking the constructional turn’. The example is the BORO foundational ontology which has, over the last decade, been taking this turn. The paper starts by providing an evolutionary context for the case history. It then provides a chronological profile of the constructional turn and the radical enrichment it delivered. This clearly establishes the feasibility and benefits of this specific role for constructionalism in applied ontology.

This report on the MODEM project is in three sections: 1) An executive summary that explains the motivation for the MODEM work. 2) An introduction to the real world analysis that was done as part of the MODEM work, which gives a deeper understanding of the ideas that underlie it and provides examples of their use. 3) A detailed technical IDEAS analysis explaining the IDEAS MODEM model. The detailed technical analysis focuses on the modelling of behaviour. It aims to re-engineer the UML behaviour model, which has no real world semantics, into an ontological foundation for the modelling of behaviour.

Each of the sections builds upon the previous section and is aimed at a different audience. The first section is aimed at management who need to understand the basis for the MODEM work. The second section is aimed at users who need to understand the issues that the MODEM work raises without delving into the technical details of the IDEAS model. The third and final section provides the detailed IDEAS analysis for the technical experts.

The presentation covers:

• Background
• Space-Time Component (plus Names)
• First workstream – Foundations: Quick View
• Second workstream - Overview
• Mapping General : Spatial Objects
• Part 42 – Mapping: Spatial Objects
• OS Open Names: Mapping
• Relations (Foundation Extension)

The presentation covers:

• Is there a workable UML profile for managing ontologies?
• What should the output of such a model be like?
• (we covered how neither UML nor OWL is ideal for this
• there are certainly problems generating OWL ontologies from the current TC211 UML profile
• the TC211 use of UML could be improved, even within its own profile)
• What Chris brings is experience (in his domain) of using UML to create/manage ontologies
• (quite probably not expressed in OWL)