In the young history of informatics, this book tells yet another story of
connecting the world and the machine. Our discipline continuously attempts
to create precise mathematical models of the world around us and
of the basic mechanisms of our networked computer systems. These models
have different properties that make them more or less appropriate to
different goals. Their objective is not only to understand the word, but to
help complement it and act on it. The main challenge is the alignment between
the business system and the technical platform system. Many organizations
struggle to meet their evolving business needs and goals in explicit
and precise relation to their underlying technical information system.
Shared abstract notations allow descriptions of both situations with common
formalisms.