Data and process revisited:

ontology driving a paradigm shift in the development of business application systems

I look at a couple of inter-related points:

1. That ontology is the foundation for a revolution (a paradigm shift) in the way we develop business application systems.
2. That (fortuitously) this new ontological way of building systems is well adapted to the (brownfield) legacy systems environment most development projects face today.

I find a good way of explaining these points is using the Kuhnian notion of a paradigm shift – and focusing on the data-process distinction within current mainstream paradigm for systems development. I consider some of the simplifying assumptions that were made when the current paradigm was developed in the late 70s – and the way their uncritical acceptance has warped the perception of the development process. I then describe how an ontological approach helps to develop more accurate and finer-grained picture of what is actually going on.

The new picture (paradigm) reveals that current development approaches are not, as commonly assumed, based upon a pure understanding of the business domain (or what is known about the domain) but wrapped up in computational design decisions. This insight helps us to see how we need to fundamentally change the way we understand the relation between an application system and its business domain. A key element of this is being able to effectively explain epistemic divergence – the difference between the domain/ontology and applications' epistemology - and this suggests a new framework for systems development.

Finally I indicate how this new framework is well adapted to the brownfield developments of today unlike the approaches that emerged from the greenfield developments common in the last century.