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Choice in Systems Evolution (Was RE: Type-assignment in one pass)
- From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>
- To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
- Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2001 13:18:15 -0600
Yes: systems for choosing. If there is only one,
there is no ambiguity. But is that a good thing?
I think it an attractive thing to mammal brains
that strive for closure instinctively and crave
power and esteem physically, but a bad
thing for systems that reciprocally evolve environments.
And you have to choose the means to choose the criteria.
Gruber talks specifically about designing an ontology with
minimal ontological commitment as a means to resist encoding bias,
thus the difference between a random source test and
an absolute information measure (shannon vs kolmogorov).
<rant>This is the essential dilemma of this century: how
to govern while conserving maximum freedom of choice
as our systems of governing must themselves, interoperate.
It is why decentralized systems work better over time
and effective negotiation is the highest skill for
governance.
The US struggles with this every day. The European
commonwealths, the industrial consortia, every list
struggling to achieve consensus, every committee chair,
all struggle with this dilemma. That is why Bosak's
scaling process description at XML.COM for OASIS is
well-worth perusing. Understand, we are evolving
toward a time when this system we are building,
the so-called semantic web, becomes a means of governing.
You must know what is in your head. You must know
what your head is in. For agent-based negotiation,
the requirements for self-aware adaptation (memory
and sense of context) are the challenge we have to
meet to make them better than justAMorePreciseSearchPortal
yet not enable them to become Golems.</rant>
Choose the means to choose the means.
Len
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard
Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric van der Vlist [mailto:vdv@dyomedea.com]
I meant that we have ambiguity as long as the criteria to choose between
alternatives are not specified.