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RE: Beyond Ontologies

• To: "'Nicolas Toper'" <ntoper@j...>
• Subject: RE: Beyond Ontologies
• From: "bryan" <bry@i...>
• Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 16:43:37 +0200
• Cc: <xml-dev@l...>
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <LLEOKCMGIEPNLPAGHFBKCECACEAA.ntoper@j...>

>blogsphere: chaotic in the social sense with consequences on the Web
and >the
>log files of some server... Say Salam Pax's blog for instance. Or I
don't
>get it at all?

I was starting to say that wasn't a good example, then I rethought and
realized it was.

The internet has self-similarity at various scales, it is a measurable
and understandable system, but certain things are difficult to predict
which can have wide reaching affects on the network, one of the things
that is difficult to predict is a glut of requests for information on
certain subjects that can cause spikes in traffic and throw the orderly
functioning of the network out of sync. So yeah, if we were to build a
system similar to Lorentz' meteorological one, wherein one of the
numbers we fed into the system at the beginning was supposed to be a
number representing swarming of requests against arbitrary nodes of the
network (representing a socially instigated swarming) then I suppose
that even tiny differences in that number could have wide ranging
network effects. 

What if for example a swarm is randomly hits the Eastern Seaboard at the
same time everyone gets into work and starts their morning surf. 
We know that kind of stuff can slow things down. So yeah, I think Salaam
Pax is an example of a butterfly flapping its wings.  


>Have you read the stuff O'reilly says about "the internet OS" (some
>articles
>are quite interesting actually: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/27)

Yeah I've read that before. I think this is just one of those memes that
is in the air in some way, that we're all trying to grope towards
expressing what is obvious. Much like nascent understandings of
evolution was before Darwin expressed it.

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