Formulationis

Formulationis is a proposed interdisciplinary field concerned with the construction, analysis, and refinement of problem formulations and their representations across domains. It focuses on transforming real-world questions into well-posed problems, precise models, and actionable specifications, while also evaluating the quality and usefulness of the formulations themselves.

Etymology and scope: the term appears as a neologism in contemporary scholarly discourse, drawing on the root formulation and the -is suffix common in some theoretical nomenclatures. It is not widely standardized, and its boundaries vary among authors, but it is generally framed as examining how problems are defined, what assumptions are made, and how those definitions influence solutions and implementations.

Overview: core concerns include clarity, scope, assumptions, constraints, and traceability. Formulationis emphasizes representation modalities such as textual descriptions, formal models, and computational schemas, and it investigates processes like elicitation, refinement, validation, and cross-domain translation. The aim is to enable better communication, reproducibility, and comparability of results across contexts.

Methods and approaches: methodological strands include decomposition and abstraction, cross-domain mapping, formalization techniques, and the development of metrics to assess formulation quality. Researchers may combine philosophical analysis with practical modeling to understand how different formulations affect reasoning and decision-making.

Applications and relation to other fields: discussions often occur in computer science, artificial intelligence, systems engineering, philosophy of science, and policy analysis. It is distinct from practical fields named after formulations (for example, drug formulation) and is more concerned with the creation and evaluation of problem statements and their representations than with the physical preparation of products.

See also: problem formulation, model-based design, knowledge representation, specification engineering.