Recipe Types

We started with recipes to manufacture products from components, described here.

Then the software started to be used by some networks (for example, the Guerrilla Translators) that did not make products from components. Instead they took documents through a series of changes. So those manufacturing recipes did not work for them.

But the idea of a recipe still fit. That is, a recipe is a reusable description of how to do something. And a computerized recipe also generates a set of processes that follow the recipe, saving you from a lot of process creation work.

So those document-processing people needed a different type of recipe. We called these Workflow Recipes. And then we called the manufacturing recipes Assembly Recipes. (Neither of those names is totally accurate, but we needed to call them something that we hoped made the differences somewhat clear.)

And Sensorica, our first network, does not really fit manufacturing yet either. We thought they did at first. But they are really in a stage of research and development, not manufacturing. R&D is not as predictable as manufacturing, but it does have regularities that could be captured by some kind of recipe, if you think of recipes as a general idea rather than a specific thing. So we are talking to them about maybe a third type of recipe, an R&D recipe. And we'll see what comes of that. Might work out, might not.