Knowledge and Object Phylogenetic Production Cascades - The TELOS Case

In the unitary design of systems involving people, objects, processes and concepts, the engineering acquires a hybrid character, requiring the coagulation between the contributions based on diverse expertises and posing coordination and communication problems inside mixed design teams. The LORNET project federates research institutions from Canada for the construction of a “middleware” supporting technical and semantic inter-operation between campuses and repositories distributed on the Internet. It is a double challenge: an effort of concurrent research for instrumenting the instructional concurrent engineering. Observing the circle between "doing by learning" and "learning by doing", activity coordination systems can be enriched with a "semantic layer" (facilitating the procedures execution by alleviating their comprehension and learning). Reciprocally, the production and management of distributed pedagogical activities require collaborative procedure modelling and orchestration. This paper is addressed to those seeking different perspectives in dealing with complexity. I summarize it as follows: mixing the management of persons, objects, processes and knowledge; using the procedures' models for their orchestration; approaching a “4d” vision for extending the observation of short process (“ontogenetic” and “physiological”) to those of long-term evolutions; unitary management of phylogenetic cascadesreproducing structures and processesbased on metafunctions.