Alastair Paton

Alastair is based in Canberra, Australia and prides himself on bridging the gap between people and their machines.

He's a mechanical engineer and started his professional life in Western Australia around power stations and heavy industry. He moved back to Canberra where he's been fortunate to perform the roles of systems engineer for multiple software intensive control systems ranging from a safety critical submarine control system to building control systems. He’s also performed the roles of configuration manager, quality manager, project manager, business analyst, and other roles within national security. He's always been interested in complexity, interconnected systems, safety, environment, and risk.

For the last decade (or so) he's been focused on developing software based on W.E. McCarthy's Resource Event Agent (REA) ontology for enterprise value-chain (and supply-chain) modelling. He's fortunate to now have his son, Patrick, a Computer Science graduate from the Australian National University (ANU), working with him and together they've built a graphical business analysis tool that's close to being workable and applied to real-world examples.

He's passionate about sharing information with his peers to help increase common understanding on what's involved, and he's currently setting up a project within his learned society looking at event-based modelling of real-world infrastructure with environmental impacts.

He believes machine-readable ontologies are a critical component to describing what's involved, and also the creation of any machine-based tools to assist in any intervention(s). Via Ontolog he's seeking to better understand foundations, concepts, and principles of machine-readable ontologies where he's keen to propose a mapping between REA & BFO compliant ontologies for review.