BRIDGES THE BUSINESS-IT GAP
Everything in IT to-date has put technology first and business a distant second, creating the Business – IT gap.
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ODASE, a next-generation software development platform based on semantic technologies – ontologies, logical rules and knowledge graphs – is different. It is explicitly and directly focused on the core of the business, closing the Business – IT gap. It is high-end business technology in harmony with IT technologies.
ADAPTS RAPIDLY TO A CHANGING WORLD
The real world is complex and changing: you need a software solution that copes with that complexity and adapts rapidly to changes. ODASE does this for you.
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SPEED
Speed is increasingly important in software development. Developers are under pressure to produce high-quality code quickly to fulfil contracts, acquire new or retain existing customers, and stay competitive.
QUALITY
Time to market contributes to overall business success. Quality is critical and cannot be compromised. Sadly, with conventional software development, one often comes at the expense of the other.
THE ODASE DIFFERENCE
ODASE dramatically reduces development time, for complex mission-critical applications and easily adapts to reflect the frequent and unpredictable business or technical changes that represent the new norm.
DOES EXACTLY WHAT THE BUSINESS EXPECTS
The most important function software developers do for clients is to document and refine what is expected and required (specifications). No other activity adversely effects the resulting system if done wrong. No other activity is harder to rectify later.​
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The specification is generally a set of documents. Unfortunately, it cannot be tested and therefore, not validated. Additionally, whilst customers have a general understanding of what they need, they likely never thought of the problem in sufficient details to build a software program.​
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Hence "The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification. Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification." Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet — Essence and accident in software engineering.​
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To tackle this head on, ODASE is based on 'ontology-centric software development': an executable business model combining an ontology with logical business rules that is understandable to the business and can be tested before any code is produced.
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The ontology is tested and explained, so that the Business deepens its understanding and can propose changes that are implemented with ease. The ontology is a 'glass box'
The ontology is tested and explained, so that the Business deepens its understanding and can propose changes that are implemented with ease. The ontology is a 'glass box' understandable to the Business. All conceptual bugs, hard to find and fix in programs, are detected and fixed before the first line of executable code is produced. The ontology is a documentation of the application and always up-to-date because it drives application.
FLEXIBLE IT ARCHITECTURE
With ODASE, the ontology is not used as a reference for writing the application by hand. Instead, the application is automatically generated from the ontology. This generated code invokes the inference engines at the heart of ODASE to execute the rules defined in the ontology.
These rules are purely declarative, which means they do not need to be executed in any particular order: each rule can be changed independently, without any impact on other rules.
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Manual code is only needed for those parts of the application not covered by the ontology (because the ontology must be kept 'clean'), such as technical integration with outside systems, e.g. REST. A typical services controller is around 100 lines of code. This has a dramatic effect on development speed, quality, cost, agility and flexibility.