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Choice in Systems Evolution (Was RE: Type-assignment in one pass)

• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• 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@d...]

I meant that we have ambiguity as long as the criteria to choose between
alternatives are not specified. 

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