MetaEngineering
MetaEngineering is the study and refinement of the technology development process. It has three aims:
- To provide the means to better delineate design spaces and facilitate their exploration.
- To identify and optimize bottlenecks in the evolution of technology.
- To identify technological design patterns to support re-use at an abstract level, and to characterize their conditions for applicability.
There are three initial projects that are being released as open source. The first is an ontology of technological concepts and events. This is currently embodied in a database containing over 2000 concepts, 1700 events, and numerous relations, etc. This knowledge base provides the data for experimental visualization tools and might eventually support case-based design tools.
The second project is called TekMap. As the name implies, TekMap is a tool for mapping and otherwise exploring the ontology. This is a java-based framework for browsing and visualizing cases, timelines, precondition graphs, and more. TekMap is very much a work in progress, but its core is quite stable and useful.
The third project is called TekMath. TekMath is a MathML equation rendering package that is used in TekMap but is itself a reusable component that should find application outside of MetaEngineering projects.
