The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

5.7. The Implementation Perspective

Finally, the implementation perspective on relationships considers how a relationship is realized or encoded in a technology context. The implementation perspective contrasts strongly with the conceptual, structural, and architectural perspectives, which emphasize the meaning and abstract structure of relationships. The implementation perspective is a superset of the lexical perspective, because the choice of the language in which to express a relationship is an implementation decision. However, most people think of implementation as all of the decisions about technological form rather than just about the choice of words.

In this book we focus on the fundamental issues and challenges that apply to all organizing systems, and not just on information-intensive ones that rely extensively on technology. Even with this reduced scope, there are some critical implementation concerns about the notation, syntax, and deployment of the relationships and other descriptions about resources. We briefly introduce some of these issues here and then discuss them in detail in Chapter 8, “The Forms of Resource Descriptions”.

5.7.1. Choice of Implementation

The choice of implementation determines how easy it is to understand and process a set of relationships. For example, the second sentence of this chapter is a natural language implementation of a set of relationships in the Simpson family:

The Simpson family includes a man named Homer and a woman named Marge, ...