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OMG™ and the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) today announced that they have agreed to work together on the development of OMG's new program to certify Systems Engineers and other practitioners on the OMG Systems Modeling Language (OMG SysML™) standard. SysML is a graphical modeling language used to perform Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) - that is, to specify and design complex systems that may include hardware, information, personnel, and facilities in addition to software. The program, to be called OCSMP™ (OMG-Certified Systems Modeling Professional), will be OMG's fourth certification. OMG, an international, open membership, not-for-profit industry consortium, maintains standards for interoperability, modeling, and process maturity including the Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®) and Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®); in addition, OMG certifies practitioners in many of these standards. INCOSE is a not-for-profit membership organization dedicated to advancing the state of the art and practice of systems engineering, in part through its Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP) certification program.

The hard (in the sense of difficult) part of service science is the social system side. INCOSE and OMG don't really address that. They address the hard (as opposed to soft) systems aspects, with people merely as more parts of an intrinsically engineered system (weapons system, transportation system, etc.). I applaud your diligence with respect to SysML and all that, but I hope your vision of the science of service systems is big enough to include the social side as well.

11. How is ontology different from object-oriented modeling? An ontology is different from object-oriented modeling (represented in UML) in several ways. First, the most profound difference is that the ontology technology is theoretically found on logic. While ontology allows automated reasoning or infer ence, object-oriented modeling does not. Another difference is the treatment of properties; while the ontology technology treats properties as the first-class citizen, the object-oriented modeling does not. That is, while the ontology technology allows inheritance of properties, the object-oriented modeling does not. While the ontology technology allows arbitrary user-defined relationships among classes (a type property), the object-oriented modeling limits the relationship types to the subclass-superclass hierarchical relationship. While the ontology technology allows adding properties to relationships such as symmetry, transitivity, and inversion so that they are used in reasoning, the object-oriented modeling does not. While the ontology technology allows multiple inheritances among classes and also among properties, the object-oriented modeling allows only single inheritances. Despite theses differences, object-oriented modeling and UML are accepted as a practical ontology specification, mostly because of their wide-spread use in industry and the multitude of existing models in UML. There is an on-going effort to add logic capability to object-oriented modeling, represented by OCL (Object Constraint Language).

daviding says: To improve our understanding of the science of service systems, I think that we need to get to the level of ontology vocabulary ... and probably no higher. SysML has features that UML doesn't ... which doesn't mean good or bad, just different.