RSADT: The Enabler of Applied Understanding Technology (AUT)
RSADT stands for Rigorous SADT, the culmination of the multi-modeling potential of my 25-year-old Structured Analysis and Design Technique (TM) that will support true Concept Engineering (not conceptual engineering, which would be quite a different matter) — in the ultimate domain where ideas are formed and transformed. SADT does not solve any problem, for it is a calculus, an algebra in the original sense of the Arabic root, which concerns not top down factoring or breaking-down into components, but rather the everywhere knitting together that heals a broken bone!
algebra n.[It., fr. Ar. al-jabr reduction of parts to all whole,
reunion of broken parts, bonesetting, fr. jabr to bind together.]
a precisely opposite view to decomposition of whole into parts! Notice the difference in quality of thought that sweeps into your consciousness when you begin to appreciate this new fact — needing no more justification than has been accessible to us (and known to etymologists) for a long time. The feel is far more biological than mechanical or mathematical — but no less logical — and even more resilient and adaptable.
"Knitting together" indeed — and on many different fronts, at rates and in forms most appropriate to each local need, with backup cohorts and other stalwarts to be thrown into the battle, should the need arise. That's the sort of elation and wonder that sprang into my mind some five years ago when (as is so often my habit) I first looked up the complete entry for "algebra" in my Webster's Third International Dictionary, 1961 Edition.
That ugly sentence (only now finished!) is, therefore, the compact pedigree of the 20-year package (1959-1979) upon which I would like to base my contribution to the MIT-Microsoft I-Campus Initiative (and I use that word, here, in preference to your longer-term term "Alliance…", because this Pre-Proposal stage, does initiate a new beginning, and I (at age 69 until the coming Winter Solstice) simply must wrap up my life's work, while I still can. After all, it's been another 20 years since I've been able to work on this RSA Design Language research component!
Let me tell you why the research stopped. Just as 1975’s notification: "Your paper caused a storm in the Program Committee --" as that body rejected my invited paper (no less! -- for ACM's first conference on Data Types) and invited me instead to air my views on a Panel -- as I tried to present my first formal paper on Plex (the Scientific Philosophy that underlies all of my professional achievements), rather than simply rehashing what had (for me) been standard ever since AED [see Toward Foundations for the Understanding of Type, Panelist Notes from Conference on Data, March 22-24, 1976, a Salt Lake City, ACM SIGPLAN Notices (Proceedings), Vol.II, Special Issue, pp.63-65.] -- (from a later page):
I find it interesting that 1976 also was the year of the Second International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE, for which the Program Committee had accepted my proposal to organize and chair the first-ever Special Session on Requirements (see Guest Editorial and two SADT papers from the January 1977 IEEETSE issue).
To pique your interest further, on the back of that "page 26" example is "page 24" from that same …Big Picture of Design RSA paper. Figure 13 extends SADT’s ICOM-Coding concept to arbitrary "encirclement" (latter called "lassoing" by others, but without the ICON Coding!). Figures 14 and 15 show the lasso in use to treat a subtle point in generalizing the Subroutine Call concept (the RSA graphic vocabulary is extended to semantically link even the lassoes! ).
There is much to be learned from building on this start in what still, after 20 years, is virgin territory with no competition even thought of elsewhere in the world -- and the same is true even more so for Plex. Concept Engineering and Design, Applied Understanding Technology, all these things are real and doable. They apply to all the kinds of activities that I-Campus could aspire to, and in the SADT basics, have been accepted broadly and successfully by many user groups, even though I cringe at how poorly the teaching of the how-to of the methodology has actually been. [I am no better, for I’m so out of practice on real SA, now -- but I’m ready and willing to lead and learn as we all must do with/for each other. It’s definitely an "open shop" enterprise! (This lack of ready skill is why I can’t just jump in an toss off those "examples showing what others’ methods can’t do". It’s an algebra for gosh sakes! It’s hard going to get it to work for you! But when it does…!!!]
Word roots, and from historical use, the proliferation of multiple meanings of words (often totally opposite and contradictory) are for me the most marvelous treasure trove of (ready-made and tested) modeling artifacts available to mankind — especially in English, which like America's socio-political style, is so free, open, and accepting. I live on word-play, and always have. Puns galore; mostly plays on oral/aural slips of our most mind-driven sensibility, where only a few time-signals, superimposed, are received, to be perceived (but only if they are conceived, first; otherwise they are noise or are reified —re-membered as a bit of mystery). In general terms,
is my Formal Saying that applies to all Understanding.
But back to my first "algebra" elation: I was more fortunate than most to be able to really appreciate that "everywhere knitting together" rather than the much simpler
views that have stood us in such good stead for so long and upon which we do so rely. My own exploitation of those non-knitting approaches had provided me with many opportunities at all stages of my professional career, stemming from my first introduction to computer-based and-enabled problem-solving on Whirlwind in 1952, as I was still taking pure mathematics graduate courses (until 1958). From the 1960s on, my own interests, matched with those of sponsors and MIT and later SofTech, led me to innovate the core features of the first software engineering and computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing efforts — culminating, in my own mind, with the SADT Structured Analysis and Design Technique in the 1970s. To me, "structured analysis" was the engineering of thought itself! (I now call it Concept Engineering, as you know.)
Beyond SADT and my earliest SA Data Modeling application of it, capturing rule-obeying things in The Object Model of my ICAM study of Characterization and Coding for Group Technology in manufacturing, I went beyond SADT proper, to do the preliminary development of the RSA Design Language. With it, multiple SA models, as well as as-yet-poorly (or even not!) structured subjects, can be conjoined in formal ways with synaptic/semantic connections, in addition to the expected structural/syntactic connections between them, to allow design goals, strategies, and purposes to be made explicit and themselves be subject to controlled and articulated engineering design. I know of no comparable capability elsewhere in the literature. My beginning work can trigger active research, given the chance. [Three years in a row the ICSE Conference program committees said it and a companion SofTech application paper didn’t fit their theme, and we lacked the time for more formal publication. The DoE application project lived on for many years, with SofTech upgrades, in use at all DoE Labs, nationwide.]
That RSA work was the final piece of background preparation of my mind-set — when I first felt the impact of the "algebra is the everywhere knitting together of healing bone" experience. It is that full sweep of 40 years of creative work (so acceptable to its using public to often become, for a period, de facto standards, and twice [APT and IDEF0] to have been made into formal, still active Standards) that I hope to bring to I-Campus as my proposed Understanding Technology Program.
There is nothing truly comparable to RSADT/AUT's Applied Understanding Technology. It stands alone in its scope and power of exposition and explanation. Although unconventional, its rigorous mathematical underpinnings are totally sound, and I long have believed that
that is embodied in the design and features of the complete SA-based technology, together represent a major step toward the additional "science" that is needed to augment our current understanding of "computer science" to reach into every aspect of academic life, study, teaching, and research. Not at all meaning to be offensive, if it is not already in the target of the I-Campus leadership, please heed my claim: We need to have a handle on how to raise our vision to include Intelligence, not just AI, and Science, not just CS in our not just Computer-based, but Web-based Science to actually achieve the system engineering as well as the un-fettered Education Technology that is to take us into the new millennium.
Ten years ago, before the WWW appeared, while serving on a 1989 NRC Panel, my written preparation for the meeting declared:
‘ "All people, not just researchers and scholars,
can either work alone on their workstation
to create individual solutions,
or worknet together on worknet solutions
as active reader/author members of worknets
to benefit from the evolution of team understanding." ’
I then went on: "The point is that it is not the network that is important, nor even the users — it is their collaborative work that matters. For every knowledge worker, a worknet bustling with self-renewing activity because it helps every participant to grow, understand, contribute, and work better is just what is needed. … The Worknet architecture must be completely open… without compromise. Each group will need both document language and comment language (perhaps the same) to… probe the meanings."
— and went on with a design criterion to guarantee that subject-meaning cannot be compromised by commentary. The only thing that needs updating is that for I-Campus, it should be sharpened: for the student/teacher/mentor users are a prime focus, as well.
In particular, since this SA technology for understanding accepts the natural language for any subject matter, the full panoply of environmental, governmental, societal, and even personal needs can uniformly be addressed — if only for the purpose of presenting clear explanations of what is going on to inform all affected constituencies! I appreciate well that it may be a long time for what I propose to be appraised, tried out, and adapted or adopted by practicing professionals (it can easily be avoided or ignored, however). But I dearly hope that I will be actively helped, through I-Campus, to find a way to assemble a starting project in order to at least get a basic graphic-support tool built, so that, finally, I can proceed to write up, in teachable, web-supported form, the needed course materials to at least make the basics available, to all MIT and collaborating university Departments, teachers and students, alike. I want the source to be open, and hopefully mostly student-generated as team or thesis projects.
I have come up short on time and ready access to people resources, to put together a proper proposal. Let me suggest a lowering of sights to envision the I-Campus preparation for just the basic training of a new type of professional communicator, akin to what the Accounting profession does for business-people and families, alike — bringing meaningful order to data that is important to the customer — useful explanations that are professionally reliable (the creative contribution being the preparation of the presentation). People need to be informed, especially in the fast-moving world of today. It seems to me that this is the most modest achievement or goal that I can present to the I-Campus Committee, other than the teaching goal.
Douglas T. Ross, Lecturer EECS Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Retired, SofTech, Inc.