LC 00571

The key notion here is that the quality of a transformation performed by an activity Q is determined by its facilitation expressed in the form of environmental conditions. The conditions may have a positive effect as well as a negative effect on the transformation. Better facilitation leads to better results, and the same holds for the opposite. In any case, a change in conditions means a change in the system in which Q is contained without changing the reason of being (P-R).

In practice, this usually means that if more resources are allocated for a system, the better a system can perform. For instance, a school might invest in more teachers resulting in smaller class sizes eventually leading to a higher quality of education. On the other hand, if less resources are available, this might have the negative effect that the quality of education is reduced to an extent that new student registration are lagging behind. This is a reinforcing, downward-oriented loop. In the end, the school has to close its doors because its reason of being – educating students – disappeared due to lack of students.

The “same Q – same P-R” pattern is akin to the hard systems approach of Systems Dynamics (SD). Think of conditions as variables and regard activities and goals as given but not required for modeling purposes, the resulting network of conditions then resembles a SD model. So, SD kind of modeling is implicitly supported within EM_ont. Even SD stocks and flows can be modeled in EM_ont. Recall that the EM_ont element Outcome is used as a means to explicate what is being produced or consumed by an activity. By refining the Outcome element and the produces and consumes relations by semantic web principles, they can be turned into a SD stock and flow construct. A computational model for EM_ont is given in … that shows how EM_ont models can be executed.

Figure: “same Q – same P-R” pattern.

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  Exploring Change
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  Different Q – Same P-R