This 5 minute video describes the notation of Ecolanguage. At 0:25, the voiceover says "There are 25 basic symbols, but there are only 6 kinds". At the bottom of the screen, those kinds are: - Sources - Organisms - Flows - Controls - Storage - Contexts At 4:00, four symbols of context are described: - All purpose (abstract, for anything you want) - Central context (abstract, for ideas and information that a group holds in common, also used to mark the leader of the group) - Land property (the ownership of land) - Price (market transaction) Red symbols mean money, and yellow symbols mean matter-energy. The other color are only symbolic (e.g. green for green plants)

The notation of ecolanguage uses shapes and colors.

This 4-minute video is worth watching. It introduces a language for modeling the ecology. At http://www.youtube.com/user/leearnold , it states "the symbols were drawn in Adobe Illustrator, then animated in Adobe After Effects", which means that there isn't good tool support for Ecolanguage, and thus takes a lot of work to construct and maintain these videos.

Video (4 minutes) by Lee Arnold that introduces Ecolanguage. At 0:50, the voiceover and slide say that Ecolanguage was inspired by Howard T. Odum's book, "Environment, Power and Society", 1971.

About this site The site http://www.umm-dev.org serves as a central access point for all information related to UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology (UMM) and the UML Profile for Core Components (UPCC). It provides information about the UMM and UPCC standard per se, academic work in the field of inter-organizational business process modeling and business document as well as tools and other important resources.

This site is a Wordpress blog, so it's possible/practical to receive a feed about ongoing development of the UMM. (The alternative may be the e-mail list). The work appears to be largely centered at universities in Austria.

At the UN -- actually the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe -- ther version 1 models and metamodels dated 2006 are published.

UMM User Guide (UMM in a nutshell) UMM Foundation Module V1.0 (2006) UMM Base Module V1.0 (2006) UMM User Guide UMM Metamodel - Revision 12 (2003) UMM Revision 10 (2001)

UMM is based in UML, which means it's about modeling the information aspects of businesses. This Wikipedia entry seems underdeveloped, so the description should taken with a grain of salt. It does point out that UMM attempts to decouple from implementation technologies such as Web Services and ebXML.

UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology, commonly known as UMM is a modeling methodology which is developed by UN/CEFACT - United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business. Goal of UMM The primary goal of UMM is to caputure business requirements of inter-organizational business processes. These requirements result in a platform independent UMM model. The UMM model can then be used to derive deployment artifacts for the IT systems of the participating business partners. UMM at a glance UMM enables to capture business knowledge independent of the underlying implementation technology, like Web Services or ebXML. The goal is to specify a global choreography of a business collaboration serving as an "agreement" between the participating partners in the respective collaboration. Each business partner derives in turn its local choreography, enabling the configuration of the business partner's system for the use within a service oriented architecture ( SOA).

I watched the first video, and it made the U.S. social security system (mismanagement) easy to understand. Note the references: Odum, Basteson, Jantsch.

Ecolanguage introduces a few new things: (1) the use of regular motion as a part of standard grammar, and (2) the use of a visual symmetry -- the hexagonal snowflake -- to stand for an organization of any kind, at any level of nature and society. In the center, we put the ruler. Everything else is based on things which came before. By using old and new things, Ecolanguage comprises: (A) an international systems language, (B) an accelerated learning strategy, (C) an integration of important and crucial topics, and (D) a scientific philosophy, emerging from many thinkers and writers over the last century, that brings the life, social, and cognitive sciences into the same picture as the physical sciences. We put the new basics of INFORMATION and ORGANIZATION alongside the established basics of MATTER and ENERGY. Now we can represent purposiveness, intention, relationship, agreement, and belief. We can locate the position of mathematical and physical deduction within a larger picture of communication and exchange. We can indicate both analysis and synthesis, including the redundancy of parts and their transcendence into wholes. It is a picture of our perceptual framework, no matter where we look. For a fun primer on this philosophy, please watch: New Chart, for Descartes. (For the old pointers, see the following bibliography.)

The Energy Systems Language (right), also referred to as Energese, Energy Circuit Language and Generic Systems Symbols, was developed by the ecologist Howard T. Odum and colleagues in the 1950s during studies of the tropical forests funded by the United States Atomic Energy Commission. They are used to compose energy flow diagrams in the field of systems ecology.

I was looking at the Systems Modeling Language page on Wikipedia, and noticed this link to Energy Systems Language, by Howard Odum. It's an interesting idea ... although it brings questions to the choice of modeling languages and approaches. No model is value-free.

The volume of auctions described at Google reflect a change made possible through advances in information technology. The only way that these auctions could be conducted is through the use of information technologies and establishment of business rules.

[....] Googlenomics actually comes in two flavors: macro and micro. The macroeconomic side involves some of the company's seemingly altruistic behavior, which often baffles observers. Why does Google give away products like its browser, its apps, and the Android operating system for mobile phones? Anything that increases Internet use ultimately enriches Google, Varian says. And since using the Web without using Google is like dining at In-N-Out without ordering a hamburger, more eyeballs on the Web lead inexorably to more ad sales for Google. The microeconomics of Google is more complicated. Selling ads doesn't generate only profits; it also generates torrents of data about users' tastes and habits, data that Google then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behavior, find ways to improve its products, and sell more ads. This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics. It's a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only Google's future but the future of anyone who does business online. [....] Kamangar and Veach decided to price the slots on the side of the page by means of an auction. Not an eBay-style auction that unfolds over days or minutes as bids are raised or abandoned, but a huge marketplace of virtual auctions in which sealed bids are submitted in advance and winners are determined algorithmically in fractions of a second. Google hoped that millions of small and medium companies would take part in the market, so it was essential that the process be self-service. Advertisers bid on search terms, or keywords, but instead of bidding on the price per impression, they were bidding on a price they were willing to pay each time a user clicked on the ad. (The bid would be accompanied by a budget of how many clicks the advertiser was willing to pay for.) The new system was called AdWords Select, while the ads at the top of the page, with prices still set by humans, was renamed AdWords Premium.

If you're interested in a single place where SSMED feeds are being collected, look at http://friendfeed.com/ssmed .

Suggestions of additional sources are welcomed.

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.