Month Year Issue

December 2002 Issue: 27

Journal of Conceptual Modeling
www.inconcept.com/jcm

Editor's Corner
by Patrick Hallock

This is first issue since this summer. Permit me to make some sort of excuse. I had the adventure of my life; in fact it was the matter of my life. In fact, twice it was hours away from being my whole life. I think the fourth time into the surgery room was the one that had the most impact. It also had the longest recovery time. I often though that people that took a long time to recover were somehow shall we say “weak” - well I stand corrected. Yes, they are weak, and for a very good reason. If you hear stories about a change of perspectives in life that is also true for some. Here is tidbit for you – of the ~60 cardiac patients 4 (including myself) were not there as a result of smoking or taking drugs or both. Having survived the marvels of medical science, we can get down to business. Also InConcept is taking some measures to assure this gap in issues does not happen again.

For all you authors, I really appreciate your patience. The stress of the delayed publication is obvious on both sides. Every day it was late you wondered – every day it was late I was worried. Now I can say, one more thing is back in place allowing some sense of relaxation.

Since our last edition, Dr. Terry Halpin has returned to the academic world at North Face Learning. This is a start-up university with a highly intensive curriculum and project based program for producing IT professionals. Terry seems very happy and far more relaxed. However, he is extremely busy developing a curriculum which from a prior life of my own I know is a very intense project. We expect to see more of Terry in the public forum now and that is good news. He has just finished moving into a new house and his life should settle down a bit and back to more enjoyable work.

I showed up at the recent Business Rules Forum to show I was still alive. It was a very good conference with several presenters mentioning ORM, especially Donald Chapin from London. Donald has been an ORM friend for years and continues to convince others.

Object Role Modeling was a hot topic of discussion at this year’s Business Rules Forum and at the OMG Business Rules Working Group meeting held in conjunction with the forum. After several presentations, Donald Chapin pre-conference session, and Terry’s presentations, the consensus seemed to be that ORM is a potential target for standardization. The bar for a business rules expression Request For Proposal to be issued by the BRWG was set to ORM or something equivalent. This follows from a strong desire to have a natural language based approach, actually a sub set of natural language, as the basis for expressing rules. The most rigorously defined approach is ORM and therefore it is a serious candidate for this effort. However, much further work and support is required to make this happen.

Please look at the response that won one of Fabian Pascal’s books. Apologies to Fabian for ignoring him, but he was in contact with Trish and keeping up to date.

I do want to thank my daughter, Trish, for helping out, answering e-mails, formatting the pages, and getting this edition out. She has been after me for some time to get this done. Every time I started to write a sentence I would quit and start over.

Also, my InConcept partners Dick Barden and Necito dela Cruz who took care of business during this time. Knowing their skills at doing projects was a comforting thought. They are a talented pair – commercial time. Truly, if I had a project to do, fast and right I would get these two guys as a set and go for it. (Extreme ORM), maybe include me as well -- I can sharpen the pencils.

Everyone – thanks for hanging in there. We expect to get many issues to you in the future.

Patrick Hallock