The Core of Information
Oriented Architecture
Jan van Til
Did you ever notice that the vast majority of
ICT people hardly talk about information
and its fundamental characteristics? They do talk nineteen to the dozen about
technical stuff like Object Oriented (OO), like Service Oriented Architectures
(SOA), like Enterprise Service Busses (ESB), like network protocols as TCP/IP
etc. etc.
None of these ‘thing’s are of real interest to you – the user/producer
of information. You only need trustworthy information at your fingertips
whenever you need it. Any time and any place and any why. The technical stuff
is crucially important – we can’t do without anymore, but should never be
leading or dominant. ICT only serves as a means to the informational end. Agree?
So, let’s orient ourselves at information and try to imagine the core
of, say, IOA – Information Oriented Architecture. Let’s trust our technologies
to be sufficiently advanced to cope with the outcomes of our new orientation:
information.
Information is used by human beings for
decision making. Making good decisions, requires you to avail yourself of the
clear meaning of that information. And meaning of information simply depends on
its context – as we readily know by now from social psychology. Other context?
Other meaning! Other decision! Information is always and inextricably (sic!)
connected to its context. Information never ever meaningfully exists an sich.
No.
Therefore IOA requires information to be
organised systematically [1]: Information connected to its Context. Context
being Information too, of course! Information gets networked in order to
provide each Information with clear meaning by means of its accompanying
Context. Sufficient Context, derived form systematically organised information and
firmly associated with the Information one needs, yields optimal possibilities
for effective and efficient decision making.
Systematically organised information can, of
course, be processed by SOA-services. Object Oriented [2] gets transformed into
Context Oriented [3]. Enterprise Service Busses still transport large amounts
of data in existing as well as new intelligent ways. Etc.
Systematically organised information naturally
provides you with information of the clearest possible meaning. Contextual
meaning, of course – which naturally develops on the fly. From this core of
IOA, human interoperability [4] becomes real. Additionally, IOA also helps to
transform several other persistent problems we face today [5].
December
2011, 2011 © Jan van Til
Notes:
[1] Detailed
information about the meaning of systematically organised information can be
found in the article “Systematic Organisation of Information”. See: http://information-roundabout.eu/articles/systematic-organisation-of-information/.
[2] OO’s paradigm
rests on absolute meaning of information; OO is too weak to cope with
situational meaning (see [4]) – which is far more realistic. See: http://information-roundabout.eu/misconceptions/object-orientations-credentials/.
[3] Meaning is not
absolute, but throughout situational. See: http://information-roundabout.eu/articles/situational-meaning/.
[4] Human
interoperability goes beyond (technical) interoperability we’re so very used
to. In case you want to know more on human interoperability as opposed to
technical interoperability: http://information-roundabout.eu/presentations/human-interoperability-2/.
This short article also points to a slide-presentation at SlideShare.
[5] An Information
Roundabout is based on (the core of) IOA and provides benefits as mentioned in:
http://information-roundabout.eu/why/.