Foundation ontology
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Universal machines
Turing machines are extremely basic symbol-manipulating devices which — despite their simplicity — can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer that could possibly be constructed. They were described in 1936 by Alan Turing. Though they were intended to be technically feasible, Turing machines were not meant to be a practical computing technology, but a thought experiment about the limits of mechanical computation; thus they were not actually constructed. Studying their abstract machine properties yields many insights into computer science and complexity theory.
A Turing machine that is able to simulate any other Turing machine is called a Universal Turing machine (UTM, or simply a universal machine). A more mathematically-oriented definition with a similar "universal" nature was introduced by Alonzo Church, whose work on lambda calculus intertwined with Turing's in a formal theory of computation known as the Church–Turing thesis. The thesis states that Turing machines indeed capture the informal notion of effective method in logic and mathematics, and provide a precise definition of an algorithm or 'mechanical procedure'.
There are many aspects to organisations, but no matter how complex, they can all be broken down to a few common patterns and concepts. All the programming languages form a huge spectrum of such break-downs, but we don't want to create another specialists' language, we want to create a small set of concepts which are turing-complete, allowing us to represent any processes we need, but that are based completely on Human organisational needs and on Human concepts.
This universal machine shows that a concept being described by a computer program is independent of the program itself, and that the concept could be translated between any Turing complete language without any loss of meaning. But what exactly is the concept then? The concept itself is purely abstract and any description of it no matter how concise is still only a description - just like no word which means "apple" will ever actually be an apple. But we can think, feel and visualise concepts without the use of language constructs, which shows that there is some fundamental strutural way of representing them which our minds and bodies use.
Some universal Turing machines are made from only a few exceedingly simple components, for instance any computer program can be described completely with only one kind of logic operator similar to x AND y. In the project, our aim is to create such a core set of basic components with which to internally describe all the applications and organisations made within the development environment (the development environment is also an application described internally this same way). The internal language allows the system to implement itself and all its applications in any language, platform or technology as necessary.
But what is the best set of basic components to use? Ideally we'd want our internal descriptions to be more compact and exhibit a less complex structure than the languages it can implement them in, so that we can move away from specialisation and make creating and collaborating on applications and organisations more accessible. In essence, we want our internal desciption of our concepts to work in a similar way to our minds where there's no arbitrary syntax, but rather a completely structural approach is taken.
Generic organisation
Applications and organisations are essentially very simple in structure compared to the kinds of problems that computability theory and Turing machines were devised to deal with. We know from experience that such structures are already heavily recursive in that a department, branch office or even a role of an organisation can itself be seen as an organisation, and this can be carried on down into the programming structure of the applicational tools used by the organisation. So the idea is to find a set of components which apply to organisations in general which can be used recursively so that the same set of components can be used to describe all levels from programming details up to management decisions.
When we take a closer look at the workings of organisations and project management, we see a definite set of generic concepts with which to begin our unification process: budgetting, cashflow, stock, storage & distribution, scheduling, production etc. These concepts really are generic to all organisation no matter what the specifics of their operations, and we could also describe any computer application as such an organisation too. But we haven't gone to basic enough components yet because the preceeding list is really just another list of organisations which still need more refined description before our basic components are revealed.
Resource & Spectrum
Breaking down these sub-organisations moves us into more abstract teritory - booking, statistics, processing, transport, storage, which themselves can really be thought of as specifically refined versions of Resource and Spectrum.
- Resource is the division and allocation process based on previous and future cycles from its connections into spectrum (field of cycles)
- But the structure of spectrum is itself very similar to resource because its the booking from the field of cycles.
- There can by any number of "clients" associated with each cycle (they're loops which are hooked into reduction).
Real-world organisation
This is primarily aimed at the small business scale at the beginning, not corporations. A number of organisations in different sectors have been observed so that some useful and complete templates can be made.
- Computer repair
- Network administration
- Retail (online and shopfront)
- Catering
- Tuition and Lecturing
- Functions and Seminars
All solutions and ways come from the metaphors of computerless organisations of all sorts; factories, warehouses, offices, businesses etc. It's not in any way against technology, it's simply that any system no matter how complicated doesn't need to depart from the fundamentals for completeness of description, even quantum field theory.
Concepts like space, time, energy, matter/information while being very low-level are still well known to everyone. Or higher level ones like resource, role, commitment, schedule are easily understood. It's only when we need to depart from such general terms to describe the inner workings of these things that confusion begins. But here we set up a simple system consisting of only such general terms. The aim is to have an accessible method of modelling and managing organisations in terms of this common pattern.
Taken as a whole, the system is very complex, but really it's the same pattern operating over many levels at once. Organisations modelled in this way work in harmony both within and outwards, so within the context of this project and the philosophies its based on, the words organisation and organism are practically synonymous.
An important aspect of the philosophical foundations of the project is self containment, independence. One special part of self-containment for development environments is self-description. Afterall, any runtime environment is really an organisation a lot like a factory, and since the software is about modelling organisations, it's own description can then also be its own proof of concept, from the fact that its running from that description.
