4D ONTOLOGY: IS IT EMERGING, GROWING, OR MAINSTREAM 

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There is a moment in baseball when everything crystallizes, or seems to, that is punctuated with  a crack when bat hits ball or vice versa.  We watch for the completion of the sailing ball’s trajectory. Will it be intersected and repurposed for an out or will it make its way past gloves, eyes, and wall for a home run.  Regardless, everything centers on that one moment when all potentiality is personified by that cracking sound as a hit.  This, however, is not the entire story of the life of a baseball.

That little narrative is in support of 4D Ontologies so bear with me.  A 4D Ontology, quite simply, includes Time along with Definitions and Associations in an Ontological Meaning Based Architecture (OMBA).

The ball begins its life in the hand of the pitcher who has all intentionality of eluding the bat and making the ball’s life very short.  The batter has a wholly different vision for what this ball can do that involves clearing the way for the batter’s rounding of a cycle through first, second, and third base, finally ending  up across home plate.  These scenarios, fantasies of both batter and pitcher, are snapshots in a much more nuanced reality of those who come in contact with the ball.

This is where a 4D Ontology steps in and models the relationships of Ball to Game, Object to Time, Insight to Culture.  Ontology visualization in its simplest form, concept mapping, is a cadaver.  Maybe you can figure out how the corpse ended up in the mortuary, what the murder weapon was, and possibly narrow down your suspects but the body lying in front of you is never going to tell you where it was all night.  That’s going to take talking to associates of the deceased and mapping those associations over time.

The more bits and pieces of the timeline that you can fill in, the more insight you’ll have, if you’re a good investigator. A person’s relationship to time can fluctuate wildly; a lifetime can pass before your eyes in an instant and you can wait an eternity for someone to complete the simplest of tasks. The evidence gathered around insights has the same flexibility relative to time.  Mobile computing languished in time as a replication of the more stationary desktop environment.  Even laptops are fairly tethered without the ability to connect to a phone service.  Virtual Forest™ has mobile computing and Third Screen Usage as mainstream evidence this quarter and embedded Wi-Fi in Fashion and apparel as emerging.  Expect embedded Wi-Fi to jump up to mainstream quite quickly to join its cousin the Third Screen.  Free Speech Texting in China will probably remain in the growing category baring some drastic change that will transform the virtual landscape all together.

The count is 3-2 with two runners on, one out, the relief pitcher just came in, it’s the bottom of the 9th, and you’re one run down.  Your switch-hitter changed up so he can drop a bloop behind the second baseman and advance the runners if not score.  How many decisions and calculated risks are running through the minds of the players is an educated guess at best but one thing is for sure, they all involve time.

The skill of the batter is not a fixed value in the mind of the pitcher.  His last at bat he whiffed a low hanging curve and the last game series wore him out by the 9th. The batter is projecting that the pitch to come is going to be weak and wild because the relief didn’t warm up long enough and he’s emerging as a rookie.  The runners and the infield all have their own temporal calculations they’re doing based on past events and future possibilities, but the uninvolved fans are just waiting for the crack of hit or thump of a strike.  Ultimately, the true athletes are in the moment because they have put their training in and have visualized their goals; they have built their own 4D Ontology of exactly what that crack or thump is going to mean.  Growing, Emerging, and Mainstream are associative conditions, they are built up through the relationships they have to each other.  Insights change over time and the “now” is not the most important, it’s the most exciting, but not the most important.

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