Dark SOA

At the SOA Reference Model dinner last night, after a some rather nice sake we were discussing things to go into the RM, this was in part kicked off my an "ovaries" diagram that nearly made it into the RM during the day.

So after a few more glasses of sake and thanks to some discussions about maths and physics that flew mainly over my head I proposed that the term "Dark SOA" should be stated as being out of scope for the Reference Model.

So what is Dark SOA? The agreed definition was something like

"The SOA Reference Model defines what good SOA looks like, there is a large mass of other work that exerts either a attractive or repulsive force on the SOA RM, these elements are currently not well understood and are extremely hard to quantify as being SOA but are currently given that label until they are better classified."

Dark SOA is therefore analogous to Dark Energy or Dark Matter, it is all of those elements which create a massive amount of noise around SOA without actually moving us forwards, its those things that just put "SOA" in front of old thinking in the hope of fooling people.

Dark Matter could be the thing that stops the universe collapsing and helps sustain those of us who live in the non-dark part. I'm not sure that Dark SOA has those benefits.