Foundation ontology

This page describes a concept which is part of our glossary

A system of operating as an evolving organisation is common to all nodes in the Ontology, the conceptual structure of this kind of organisation that captures these principles of collaboration and self-governance is considered to be the Foundation Ontology for the OrganicDesign system. The Foundation Ontology is a common form of organisation that spans both real-world organisation, and informational systems alike, it defines what it is to be a node in the unified Ontology. Since the Foundation Ontology defines the attributes that are common to all organisations in the network, it's important that the bottom lines designed in its system are remain aligned with the core values.

The OOP paradigm was designed to allow software and systems to be designed where the description of the program which is interpreted and acted upon by the computer has a direct relationship with the high-level model of the system. prototype-based languages make objects even more isomorphic to the real world by allowing any collections of functionality and information to be used as either an instance or a class on which other instances are based. The semantic web also extends the object paradigm by creating a universal concept network which can be knitted together in a uniform way to create standard ontologies.

Semantic Structure of the Foundation Ontology

• Globally unique references (URI)
• Typed relationships between nodes (triple-space)
• Relative addressing
• Templates (classes and instances)

Implementing System Requirements

The next thing after this general semantic layer is defined in to define the components common to systems so that we can then start defining the higher level functionality required by the software architecture and platform specification.

System: A system is a working description of entities and their interactions; i.e. an abstraction of people and the things they interact with). When a group of people work together in alignment toward a common vision, they become an organisation.

An important aspect of systems which is all too often forgotten is that it must be designed to account for the forces at play in its operating environment. In the same way that a physical machine must account in its design for forces such as gravity and momentum, so must an organisation or social mechanism account for the forces such as the conflicting goals of existing centralised systems, or peoples habits that are based on wide-spread false conceptions.

The most fundamental and dominant force is fragmentation which benefits the centralised, materialistic, self-oriented systems that emerge generally in our social mechanism in the form of the economic bottom line. So in our deployment of the common vision, we must ensure that our organisational infrastructure is properly designed to be deployed into a heavily fragmented and centralised environment which is in many cases overtly hostile to systems aligned towards unification.

The most common means that these opposed systems use to hinder alignment is through the use of legally binding contracts which in turn occur through the acceptance of benefits (i.e. there doesn't necessarily need to be a piece of paper with a signature involved for a legally binding contract to exist between parties). So independence is the key to being able to freely pursue the common vision.

In the context of OrganicDesign the group of people are a trust group and the fundamental kind of organisation they can choose to become is a Platform by implementing together the system defined by the Platform specification. [more]

See also

• System
• Ontology
• Bottom line
• Web 3.0