| Phase | 6-Grad |
| Prog. | DGP |
| Adm. – Grad. | 2013 – 2023 |
| Dir.; Codir. | Stéphane Gagnon |
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-potvin-4231482/ | |
| UQO | https://di.uqo.ca/id/eprint/1499/ |
Data With Direction: Design Research and a System Specification for ‘An Internet Of Rules’
Potvin, Joseph
This research fills a gap in project management theory and practice, which concerns how any stakeholder discovers and obtains factual knowledge of the significant rules that are ‘in effect’ for dates/times and prerogatives relating to identities and jurisdictions of a given context; that are ‘applicable’ to the class of endeavour and task being undertaken; and that are ‘invoked’ by a particular circumstance of the moment.
Something has to supply the directionality to projects. Rules are directional relations between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought’ to be, established among two or more individuals or entities. In practical, logical, ethical and aesthetic matters, rules express obligation, permission or encouragement through the commonly capitalized terms MUST, MAY and SHOULD, or their various negatives and synonyms.
This dissertation excavates the conceptual foundations of rules and rule systems, and describes the rationale, design, feasibility, generalizability and utility of a networked computational method for anyone to author, publish, discover, fetch, scrutinize, prioritize and, with agreement of direct stakeholders, automate normative data which relates what ‘is’ with what ‘ought’ to be, with deference to prerogatives, agreements and preferences. We propose the Data With Direction Specification (DWDS) as a specification for a class of data-processing pipeline summarized with the relation ‘IS + RULE ⟾ OUGHT’.
Applied research has been pursued concurrently for proof-of-concept validation through the development of working reference implementation software under free-libre-open source licensing and methods. This has included active peer review of the iterative design with professionals in a variety of potential implementation communities. The reference implementations are minimum working models of the specifications, including a RuleMaker application, a RuleTaker component, and a RuleReserve network service. Running these together enables an emergent ‘Internet of Rules’. Sample use cases other than those which illustrate various functional details are beyond the scope of the present design research which is to enable a general purpose system.
This dissertation begins with a problem statement, a multi-faceted ‘available methods review’ (which is akin to a literature review, but is focused on functional design), and a comprehensive design research’ methodology. The core of the dissertation is a precise technical rationale and design description of a decentralized distributed network service for anyone to author, publish, discover, fetch, scrutinize, prioritize and, with agreement of direct stakeholders, automate rules that are ‘in effect’, ‘applicable’ and ‘invoked’ by a circumstance, across any informatics network, with precision, simplicity, scale, speed and resilience, along with deference to prerogatives, agreements and preferences.