A Critique of the Authoritative Source of Truth Concept in Model-Based Systems Engineering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the ongoing adoption of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) as a best practice in several domains there are ongoing efforts to improve the maturity of MBSE methods. In the vision for MBSE several organizations and actors foresee a landscape where there is a governing system model acting as an Authoritative Source of Truth (ASoT). The main argument for the ASoT is to have a single source where all information can be accessed and written to inside of an organization, supporting consistency and management of data. Recent works have proposed solutions that implement tool chains to support the ASoT. In this paper we take a critical look at the concept of ASoT and discuss several issues that inhibit ASoT creation and maintenance. We discuss challenges from three perspectives; systems theory, technical challenges, and industrial barriers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.099 | 0.125 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.079 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.035 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.033 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".