Research into Industry Seminar: 30 November 2006
Applying 4D ontologies to Enterprise Architecture: God's-eye view of history, Matthew West, Shell
Enterprise Architecture is the term used for a number of related models that together describe an enterprise and its information systems. Many of these models are ontological in nature or have ontological content.
A particular problem companies face is that historically many of their models have been "snapshot" or "current state" models and have not been able to manage the history of the enterprise, and of the models used to manage its information. With increasing regulation, such as Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, this is becoming an urgent problem.
4 Dimensionalism is a paradigm that sees objects as extended in time as well as space. As such it has history built in, using a "God's eye view" (outside time). Space-time maps are a technique for showing the patterns different sorts of individuals make in space-time and are a valuable aid to analysis. We will explore the use of these before looking briefly at one or two examples of how they have been used to develop and support Shell's Downstream (oil tanker to petrol pump) data model