Brainiac Thomas Beale at the Good Electronic Health Record (GEHR) has his latest (HTML draft here, PDF draft here) of his paper on ‘Future Proof Information Systems’. With an Introduction here: ‘…the usual legacy IS systems…have a limited lifespan and are expensive to modify and extend in order to accommodate changing needs…The approach proposed here is a rigorous knowledge-modelling one, and is founded on a basic tenet: the separation of domain and technical concerns in information systems. In real terms, this translates to:
- The removal of domain concepts from concrete software and database models, into independently managed, standardised vocabularies and domain-specific models.
- Re-engineering the software and database as a knowledge representation (KR) system architecture, designed to process information by using externally supplied domain definitions…’