Authors:
James Brucato
1
and
Dov Dori
2
Affiliations:
1
Palermo Euro Terminal srl, Italy
;
2
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Technion and Israel Institute of Technology, United States
Keyword(s):
Object Process Methodology, Software Engineering, System Engineering, Computability, Compositional Logics.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Data Engineering
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge Representation
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
MetaModeling
;
Models
;
Ontologies and the Semantic Web
;
Ontology Engineering
;
Paradigm Trends
;
Software Engineering
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Traditionally, Software Engineering (SWE) and Systems Engineering (SE) were almost different disciplines with little overlap and with a different set of approaches and concepts. Yet, both SWE and SE reflect two sides of the same coin: both revolve around development and lifecycle support of systems. While SWE focuses on software-intensive systems, SE has focused on systems in general. However, most systems nowadays not only combine hardware and software, ever more intertwined and increasingly interdependent, they also comprise humans and organizations as stakeholders. This work aims to underline the importance of the holism as highly effective approach to both SWE and SE as it is the result of a huge and very representative set of philosophical investigations, partially illustrated in this work, assuming that the historical distinction between SWE and SE is becoming ever less relevant and that it is high time they be treated as one overarching discipline provided with a minimal ontol
ogy in order to facilitate the conceptual modelling process and improve models understandability. We propose the Object Process Methodology (OPM), together with its holistic approach to systems modelling and simulation, as main building block of the bridge between SWE and SE disciplines with respect the issues above.
(More)