Practices ​

Now you find yourself in some role, within this role you have fairly defined plans, you are about to perform actions characteristic of this role. We will refer to such typical actions familiar to you in this role as "practices".

For some of our roles, we develop (invent) practices ourselves. Some practices we learn in educational organizations, and some we pick up from other people who clearly or implicitly convince or compel us to take on a new role, after which we will start to look at the world from this role and its perspective.

If you don't know the typical actions at all and there is no one to teach you - then you are most likely not familiar with the role required of you, you will improvise everything on the go, and at first, you will not be able to make any meaningful selection of objects, but will randomly grab whatever comes to hand.

You can learn more about roles and practices in our course "Systems Thinking", and information about typical roles in various types of activities will be provided in the courses on applied engineering.

In the role of a chef, knowing that you will need to clean, measure, cut, cook, and fry - you surely paid attention first to the recipe book, the ingredients in the fridge, kitchen equipment (knives, cutting boards), dishes, sink, stove. And not to the picture on the wall, wallpaper, chandelier, and so on. Noises beyond the kitchen will only interest you if you are assessing if your household will interrupt your work. The weather outside - only if you want to decide whether to turn on the light above the stove.

When you look from your role, you see the necessary set of objects that capture your attention, highlighted by you from the background. Role consideration becomes the starting point for object selection. Selecting a set of objects becomes the first step towards ontology development and activity modeling (this path will be long). But we will already call such a set an "ontology", gradually refining this concept. And we will also sometimes refer to it as a "worldview", implying a specific view of the world from a certain role.

Notice that when people select objects for their activities, they rarely explicitly think about their role. You simply do not notice yourself, you do not articulate the question: "How do I look at this apple (laptop, glass of water, tasks, employees, husband, wife, project, company) right now?"

If you ask yourself such a question for practice, you will find that in most cases it is not very difficult to answer, and in simple everyday situations, the answer will be obvious and not very interesting. But in complex situations, when your interlocutor does not understand you, or you do not understand the interlocutor, this practice will yield results - you will automatically question the role (yours or the interlocutor's), find an answer, and very often this will be enough to improve communication.

As an important next principle, notice that based on the practices of the role, when selecting objects we primarily consider their functions, that is, what can be useful in terms of necessary actions in your role.

If you need to ladle soup into plates, and you can't find a ladle - a mug will satisfy your needs, essentially you will select the object "ladle". If you can't find a cutting board - you will pay attention to the quality of the work surface and its cleanliness, that is, you will be interested in the object "cutting place".

By the way, other people - are, of course, objects you select. And here it is important to note that you might either be genuinely interested in these people as individual biological entities (for example, if you are in the role of a doctor), or you might only be interested in specific aspects of people's activities in a certain role (for example, as a manager you might be interested in the work roles of people within the company's activities, not the people themselves altogether).

So before selecting people, it would be good from your role to see (select) other roles, and then look for who fulfills them. And here it may turn out that you need as objects not only people but other agents as well, for example, computers with intelligent programs.

In addition to the functional view of selected objects, there are other views in the systemic approach, but we will not dwell on them now, just remember them for the future, you will come across them in other courses. But we will return to the functional view in more detail in this course, special (and quite exotic) "functional objects" will also be encountered.

To reiterate - the source of objects for ontology is precisely the role consideration and selection of the functionality of objects significant for this role (for its actions, practices). That is, for a qualitative selection of objects, you must explicitly ask yourself questions:

• Who am I? What role am I in?
• What actions (practices) does this role imply? What will I be doing now?
• What is necessary to perform the actions I need? What functions will I need?
• Where will I be acting, what fragment of the world is around me? What is or what can be around me (what is the background here)?
• What objects here can be useful for carrying out these functions?

When you first encounter a new role and its practices, you will most likely be explained about the necessary objects. You will learn from lectures, textbooks, standards, methodologies. Examples will be shown to you, templates will be provided for selecting and describing objects. Therefore, the objects you select from the very beginning will at least partially coincide with some other agents who are in this same role. We say that ontology must be necessarily shareable. Objects uniquely selected by you may be useful to you personally (if you are a brilliant inventor in an entirely new field), but they are useless in communication until you share them with others.

In a familiar role, object selection occurs in seconds, after which the piece of the world that was previously a coherent background is divided into objects and everything else (background), and this can be fixed, for example, written down for yourself or for others.

Shared objects, understandable to a significant number of representatives of a certain role, are commonly referred to collectively as a "subject area". For example, culinary arts - are a subject area for the role of a "chef", construction work - a subject area for the role of a "builder". Subject areas are a convenient way to divide large ontologies into parts of varying sizes, for development, study, and use.