Apologies on being MIA and a quote from Abraham Lincoln

I started a new job (at CA, Inc.) and had to take a bit of time to learn the company and my role. Now that I am settled in (as much as one can ever settle in :-)), I can get back to devoting some time to blogging. With the disclaimer that ...

The opinions and statements on this site are my own and do not reflect the opinions or policies of CA, Inc.

So, onto my return post, I simply want to publish a quotation from Abraham Lincoln that is very relevant to semantics and models ...

How many legs does a dog have, if you call his tail a leg? The answer is four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

It is unbelievable how often I hear things like "just change the name/representation of foo to be bar and we can get alignment". However, the real issue is not the representative name (which should indeed be clear), but the semantics that the people used, who defined the word "foo" in the first place. If we could move modeling to more than words on a UML diagram, to analyzing semantics ... we would be much better off.

Another thing that I sometimes hear is the question "what makes an instance a foo"? For example, "if I magically change the color and size of an elephant is it still an elephant?" Or, riffing on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's theory, "is a black swan a swan?" Semantics will help us understand what being a swan or an elephant or an IT service means - beyond the name. And, we have an added benefit ... if we make the essential definitions clear, then we have a better way to correct invalid definitions by removing problematic clauses (such as "all swans are white").

Andrea