Remembering ICAM and a Lost SDLC Opportunity

It was in the 70's when the Air Force developed the concept of Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing (ICAM). Technocrats concluded that building software to support complex manufacturing required software with some means of representing the meaning connected to software elements. Thus was born Integration DEFinition for Information Modeling (IDEF1X).

Fast forward decades of software engineering. Today most software is constructed with an ad doc relationship to domain meaning -- that is, without a semantic data model.

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