Object Process Methodology

Object Process Methodology (OPM) is a conceptual modeling language and methodology for capturing knowledge and designing systems, specified as ISO/PAS 19450. Based on a minimal universal ontology of stateful objects and processes that transform them, OPM can be used to formally specify the function, structure, and behavior of artificial and natural systems in a large variety of domains.OPM semantics was originally geared towards systems engineering, as it can model information, hardware, people, and regulation. However, in recent years OPM started to serve also researchers in molecular biology, yielding new published findings related to the mRNA lifecycle. This is a clear indication of the universality of the object-and-process ontology.:vi Object Process Methodology (OPM) is a conceptual modeling language and methodology for capturing knowledge and designing systems, specified as ISO/PAS 19450. Based on a minimal universal ontology of stateful objects and processes that transform them, OPM can be used to formally specify the function, structure, and behavior of artificial and natural systems in a large variety of domains. OPM was conceived and developed by Dov Dori. The ideas underlying OPM were published for the first time in 1995. Since then, OPM has evolved and developed. In 2002, the first book on OPM was published, and on December 15, 2015, after six years of work by ISO TC184/SC5, ISO adopted OPM as ISO/PAS 19450. A second book on OPM was published in 2016. Object Process Methodology (OPM) is a conceptual modeling language and methodology for capturing knowledge and designing systems. Based on a minimal universal ontology of stateful objects and processes that transform them, OPM can be used to formally specify the function, structure, and behavior of artificial and natural systems in a large variety of domains. Catering to human cognitive abilities, an OPM model represents the system under design or study bimodally in both graphics and text for improved representation, understanding, communication, and learning. In OPM, an object is a thing that exists, or might exist, physically or informatically. Objects are stateful—they may have states, such that at each point in time, the object is at one of its states or in transition between states. A process is a thing that transforms an object by creating or consuming it, or by changing its state. OPM is bimodal; it is expressed both visually/graphically in Object-Process Diagrams (OPD) and verbally/textually in Object-Process Language (OPL), a set of automatically-generated sentences in a subset of English. A patented software package called OPCAT, for generating OPD and OPL, is freely available. The shift to the object-oriented (OO) paradigm for computer programming languages, which occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, was followed by the idea that programming should be preceded by object-oriented analysis and design of the programs, and, more generally, the systems those programs represent and serve. Thus, in the early 1990s, over 30 object-oriented analysis and design methods and notations flourished, leading to what was known as the 'methods war'. Around that time, in 1991, Dov Dori, who then joined Technion – Israel Institute of Technology as faculty, realized that just as the procedural approach to software was not necessarily the most adequate one, neither was the 'pure' OO approach, which puts objects as the sole 'first class' citizens, with 'methods' (or 'services', or 'operations') being their second-class subordinate procedures. When he and colleagues from University of Washington were trying to model a system for automated transformation of engineering drawings to CAD models, he realized that not all the boxes in their model were really objects; some were things that happen to objects. When he circled those things, a bipartite graph emerged, in which the nodes representing objects—the things that exist—were mediated by those circled nodes, which were identified as processes—the things that transform the objects. Dori published the first paper on OPM in 1995. In 1997, the 'methods war' culminated in the adoption of the Unified Modeling Language (UML), by the Object Management Group (OMG), making it the de facto standard for software design. UML 1.1 was submitted to the OMG in August 1997 and adopted by the OMG in November 1997.