Roy's One World

One World Information System™

"Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think." Benjamin Disraeli

OWIS Federal Tax ID/EIN # 20-8041935

OWIS DUNS # 101204332

OWIS urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.4912

OWIS SIC 7379, 8742, 8748, 8732

OWIS NAICS 542512, 541519, 541611, 541618

GEM ASN.1 Dotted OID: 2.25.146725524473310302975917199564148688155

GEM ANS.1 URN:oid:2.25.146725524473310302975917199564148688155

GEM ASN.1 UUID: 6e624ee0-e175-11d9-8435-0002a5d5c51b

(OWIS Approach to Management)

OWIS is the public provider of Roy Roebuck's Generalized Endeavor Management™ (GEM™ ) methodology. GEM™ provides a mechanism to support "Physical Independence and Situational, Historical, and Plan Awareness"™. The current industry initiatives in Enterprise Information Portals (EIP) and Business Intelligence are steps towards the capabilities provided by an information system built with from GEM™ design.

GEM™ implements Roy's invention of a Generalized Management™ approach (i.e., concepts, methodology, on metamodel (and metaschema, and schema) for individuals, teams, organizations, nations, and species. (NOTE: I use the prefix "meta" to mean "context-for".)

GEM™ is the foundation for the improvement approach Roy calls "Context Management"™, which is the automated support of contextual awareness (relevant situational omniscience™) for enterprise processes, individuals, groups, organizations, and value chains.

GEM™ is a technology-supported approach designed to manage "everything". Thus, it can be used to manage "any thing", and the integration of that "thing" with "any and all other things". It provides a method and can provide a mechanism for near-absolute inherent integration of all things.

Basically, these things are identified in GEM™ with their names (pronouns and/or pronoun phrases), and the relations between them as verbs and/or verb phrases, yielding a basic "subject and predicate (verb + object) grammar structure, also known as a sentence, clause, semantic, proposition, assertion, or statement. These word structures are used in architecture, sentence diagramming, as a W3C Resource Definition Format (RDF) triple (subject/verb/object), etc.

The collections of interlinked semantics/etc. yields powerful capabilities such as subject ontologies (i.e., knowledge structures) and knowledge bases, current and historical facts along with projected/future possible/planned "facts", and architectures at any scale from the universal/cosmic down to the enterprise, infrastructure, system, software, molecular, atomic, and subatomic

In GEM™, these names/pronouns and their relations are also given universally unique and relative (e.g., categorical, container/component, predecessor/successor, prior/future) identifying names, enabling GEM™ to operate as a universal "hierarchical namespace management" (i.e., taxonomy) and "Knowledge Management" tool, useful for such purposes as enterprise management, enterprise integration, enterprise improvement, enterprise engineering, enterprise architecture, enterprise security, etc. An enterprise, and thus GEM™ support, can exist from the individual to the global level.

Basic Definitions for GEM™:

General: Concerned with, applicable to, or affecting the whole or every member of a class or category. Generalization is necessary for integration, interoperability, negotiation, and sharing.

Enterprise: A purposeful endeavor (i.e., effort).

Management: The process of resolving complexity and diversity in science, society, and perceptions into a dynamic system of controlled order.

Regarding Management, when an enterprise decision maker (i.e., anyone) determines where they are in their endeavor, where they want to go (i.e., the goals), how they're going to get there, and appropriately adjusts their resource, pace and path, and if necessary, their goals, to achieve success in their endeavor, then they are performing the management process - resolving complexity into a controlled order.

The precept at the foundation of GEM™ is a "systems perspective" holding that there is only "one thing", and "anything and everything" fits within that one thing. Thus, any thing is directly connected to every other thing.

This single-system perspective is known in philosophy as "Panentheism", and would represent the gestalt (i.e., greater than the sum) of all things. Ontologically, GEM™ was conceived and designed as a generalized object model encompassing the known and unknown universe, and the resulting dynamic order greater than the sum of all their parts. GEM includes information, time, space, energy, and matter, while excluding nothing.

The terms "Knowledge Age" and "pervasive connectivity" are becoming prevalent in the community of the Web. I believe we should join those terms' implications to state that we are accelerating more into the "Awareness Age"™, as a predecessor to the "Age of Wisdom"™.

As background, prior to our technology advances in the industrial and information ages, our awareness was largely sense-based and verbally communicated. Then, as we began to write and then print information, our awareness began to be intellectually based, and communicated in the physical transport of information packages (i.e., books, manuscripts, paintings, music) that were accessible by a select few individuals. This early distribution of information led to cultural and scientific explorations, which led to the industrial age. The industrial age provided increased awareness because of increased production and distribution of written and visual information, and more people could read them and see/hear them because of the education of the industrial labor force. The increased production and distribution efficiencies of the industrial age led to the information age, and now the Internet. The Internet is removing the time and distance constraints in publishing and distributing information, and gradually removing the time and knowledge constraints on harmonizing and accessing that information, thus giving greater emphasis to reading and artistic expression, in single and multiple languages, thus broadening our viewpoint and perspectives.

Soon, our awareness will have much greater automated support, as described below, yielding increasingly broader awareness on a global scale. This is a twofold global scale, in that any individual on the globe can have global awareness of the situations that are contextually relevant to them at a given moment. The expanding use of mobile computing and informing devices is a case in point.

See diagram. I see the following "Contextual" progression of our individual and collective "Intelligence" towards "Awareness", and its successor, "Wisdom":

Situational "Events" (real or virtual) generate "Signals" (digital or analog), which are "Transmitted" through a "Medium", which are "Received" by "Sensors" of a "Receiver", which "Organizes" the Event, Transmitter, Medium, Signal, Receipt, and Sensor "Attributes" into Contextual "Data" of the Event, "Stored" in a variety of "Records". This is basic information science.

Expanding on that, Stored Event Data, Organized in the "Viewer's" Context as a "Perception", "Report", "Form", "Document", "Table" (or "Book", or "Artwork", etc.) is "Information".

Progressing from this foundation, Information in Context is "Knowledge", Knowledge in Context is Awareness, and Awareness in Context is Wisdom, used for making situational decisions.

With the evolution of database and online technology moving from operational data environments (transactional systems), to analytical environments (OLAP, DSS, Business Intelligence, Data Mining, etc.), to Online Transactional and Analytical applications, to their combination in Enterprise Information Portals with "role-based access" and privacy-controls (the center-point of the Knowledge Age), it won't be long until a "user's" Knowledge is continuously and automatically refreshed based on the user's dynamic context, thus giving us entrance to the Awareness Age™. In this scenario, the user could represent a person, mechanism (application or appliance), group, or organization.

When the Awareness Age™ is prevalent across our world, then we will begin to enter the Wisdom Age™. To understand the implications of the Awareness Age™ and Wisdom Age™, consider that the term "pervasive connectivity" is also descriptive of the intellectual, mental, emotional, and perceptual state of one who believes that they have a personal relationship with God and the entire world, i.e., a mystic. See diagram.

In the same way that our progress in exchange (transportation) and interchange (telegraph, telephone, telecommunication, and television, TCP/IP networks) have led to greater access to global information, thus increasing our awareness, the Internet and the Web's form of interchange will lead to even greater evidence and acceptance of our interdependence as a whole. It will provide the means to help those people who seem themselves as isolated and separate from each other to understand that they are all connected to each other and the world around them. This sense of interdependence, without loss of unique identity, is a foundation for a personal sense of freedom, responsibility, love (as what you include in your identity), and power.

GEM provides support for analysis, synthesis, simulation and forecasting, decision analysis, and decision support of integrated, whole-enterprise and value-chains (e.g., market segments) such as:

Carbon-Costs of Life Styles
Economic Systems
Educational/Workforce Interdependencies
Environmental Impacts
Global Warming
Engineering Architecture (e.g., OMB FEA, DoDAF/C4ISR, TOGAF, Zachman)
Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA)
Government Paperwork Elimination Act (GPEA),
Clinger-Cohen Act (CCA)/IT Management and Reform Act (ITMRA)
CMMI/ISO-9000/SixSigma
Balanced Scorecard
Information Assurance

GEM also provides a solid and secure organization/function mission basis to support linked technical projects for System Engineering, Software Engineering, and more) GEM is metadata-tool neutral, but has identified that few metadata tools are fully sufficient for GEM use. We've found several open-standard, open-source, and commercial software products which meet our design specifications that can be integrated in various combinations to build operational GEM repositories to support the GEM methodology, and GEM-based applications to leverage the methodology and repository, while maximizing a user's current technology and metadata investments to the highest extent possible.

One World Information System...

One World Information System™