The development of IT applications in businesses requires managing the concepts of business functions. The use of conceptual engineering allows transforming conceptual structures into processes that are based on the necessary binary actions and catalysts to ensure the achievement of results when developing IT applications.
To be able to develop the binary actions that are needed to deal with adaptive entities, it is necessary to manage their intrinsic and extrinsic concepts.
On the one hand, intrinsic concepts are defined by the fundamentals that make an entity work (see the example of the electric motor). On the other hand, the extrinsic concepts define the fundamentals of the functional use of an entity in the environment.
It must be considered that any entity has intrinsic and extrinsic concepts, while ideas and human actions only have extrinsic concepts.
IT Applications drive Binary Actions
Unicist IT applications drive binary actions to ensure results. It is evident that human actions happen in an environment, which makes them essentially adaptive. Therefore, their extrinsic functionality depends on the feedback of the context. The research on the integration of intrinsic and extrinsic concepts and the use of binary actions was led by Peter Belohlavek and Diego Belohlavek at The Unicist Research Institute.
Intrinsic concepts deal with the functionality of an entity. For example, the functionality of an electric motor, an airplane, or a system needs to be known to make it work. The case of the intrinsic functionality of an electric motor will clarify why the intrinsic concepts need to be known to build an electric motor. The binary actions of an electric motor are evident.
The Electric Motor
The purpose of an electric motor is to convert electrical energy into the mechanical energy. DC motors and AC motors are based on the same essential principles that define their triadic structure (purpose-active function-energy conservation function).
Their active function is based on transforming electrical energy into magnetic energy. The energy conservation function transforms the magnetic energy into mechanical energy.
The binary actions of the process are, on the one hand, the transformation of electrical energy into magnetic energy and, on the other hand, the transformation of the magnetic force into mechanical energy. These processes happen within the rotor and the stator of an electric motor. The extrinsic concept of an electric motor fully depends on the use.
How Integration Takes Place
When the functionality of an entity is researched it is necessary to define its intrinsic and extrinsic concepts. The intrinsic concept is the active function of the extrinsic concept while the energy conservation function is the internal catalyst of the extrinsic function.
An example will help to understand how the functionality of intrinsic and extrinsic concepts works. Any user management, being it a subscription of a newspaper or the registration of users of information systems, works the same way.
An Example: the User Management System
A user management is a simple system that does not require being adaptive. What is adaptive in the system is the human aspect when it exists. User management of subscribers in newspapers might be fully automated and there are no extrinsic concepts. The extrinsic concept is only required when there is a context that influences the intrinsic concept.
The intrinsic concept of a user management system
The purpose of a user management system is implicit in its name, it is the management of users. To fulfill this purpose, it is necessary that the system includes two integrated binary actions.
On the one hand, the addition of new users and, on the other hand, the removal of users. The modification of the attributes of users is an integration of both preceding actions.
These two actions need to be integrated to ensure their functionality, which means that when there is a removal, what needs to be removed has to be what has been added before, with the exception of the modifications.
The Extrinsic Concept of User Management
The wide context that sustains the user management is the need to have a system that ensures the functionality and security of processes. The system itself has been designed following the binary actions of the intrinsic concept.
The restricted context is given by the quality assurance system that is included which needs to confirm:
- that the information of the system is accurate
- that the system can be used
- that there are no security risks
There are two binary actions to be achieved. On the one hand, the action of a quality assurance system and, on the other hand, the action of a notification system.
- To achieve this, there must be an external quality assurance system that uses automatic processes to ensure the validity of the information.
- It needs to include a notification system that includes automated processing of the responses to ensure that the information that is uploaded is accurate.
IT Applications: the use of Unicist Functional Design
The use of conceptual engineering allows transforming this conceptual structure into processes that include the necessary binary actions and catalysts to ensure the achievement of results.
The user management systems include business objects to manage automated processes of confirmation that avoid the introduction of human errors. The design includes the development of functionality tests and destructive tests to measure the functionality of the system. The destructive tests of the different actions of the system define the reliability of such system.
