Knowledge society arguments revisited in the semantic technologies era

In the light of high profile governmental and international efforts to realise the knowledge society, I review the arguments made for and against it from a technology standpoint. I focus on advanced knowledge technologies with applications on a large scale and in open- ended environments like the World Wide Web and its ambitious extension, the Semantic Web. I argue for a greater role of social networks in a knowledge society and I explore the recent developments in mechanised trust, knowledge certification, and speculate on their blending with traditional societal institutions. These form the basis of a sketched roadmap for enabling technologies for a knowledge society

System-of-Systems Complexity

The global availability of communication services makes it possible to interconnect independently developed systems, called constituent systems, to provide new synergistic services and more efficient economic processes. The characteristics of these new Systems-of-Systems are qualitatively different from the classic monolithic systems. In the first part of this presentation we elaborate on these differences, particularly with respect to the autonomy of the constituent systems, to dependability, continuous evolution, and emergence. In the second part we look at a SoS from the point of view of cognitive complexity. Cognitive complexity is seen as a relation between a model of an SoS and the observer. In order to understand the behavior of a large SoS we have to generate models of adequate simplicity, i.e, of a cognitive complexity that can be handled by the limited capabilities of the human mind. We will discuss the importance of properly specifying and placing the relied-upon message interfaces between the constituent systems that form an open SoS and discuss simplification strategies that help to reduce the cognitive complexity.Comment: In Proceedings AiSoS 2013, arXiv:1311.319

On the emergent Semantic Web and overlooked issues

The emergent Semantic Web, despite being in its infancy, has already received a lotof attention from academia and industry. This resulted in an abundance of prototype systems and discussion most of which are centred around the underlying infrastructure. However, when we critically review the work done to date we realise that there is little discussion with respect to the vision of the Semantic Web. In particular, there is an observed dearth of discussion on how to deliver knowledge sharing in an environment such as the Semantic Web in effective and efficient manners. There are a lot of overlooked issues, associated with agents and trust to hidden assumptions made with respect to knowledge representation and robust reasoning in a distributed environment. These issues could potentially hinder further development if not considered at the early stages of designing Semantic Web systems. In this perspectives paper, we aim to help engineers and practitioners of the Semantic Web by raising awareness of these issues

Developing a conceptual model for exploring emergence

Emergence is a fundamental property of complex systems and can be thought of as a new property or behaviour which appears due to non-linear interactions within the system; emergence may be considered to be the 'product' or by-product of the system. For example, within social systems, social capital, the World Wide Web, law and indeed civilization in general may be considered emergent, although all within different time scales. As our world becomes increasingly more interconnected, understanding how emergence arises and how to design for and manage specific types of emergence is ever more important. To date, the concept of emergence has been mainly used as an explanatory framework (as used by Johnson 2001), to inform the logic of action research (Mitleton-Kelly 2004) or as a means of exploring the range of emergent potential of simulation of real complex systems (Axelrod 2003). If we are to improve our ability to manage and control emergence, we need first to directly study the phenomenon of emergence, its causes and consequences across real complex systems

Socionics: Sociological Concepts for Social Systems of Artificial (and Human) Agents

Socionics is an interdisciplinary approach with the objective to use sociological knowledge about the structures, mechanisms and processes of social interaction and social communication as a source of inspiration for the development of multi-agent systems, both for the purposes of engineering applications and of social theory construction and social simulation. The approach has been spelled out from 1998 on within the Socionics priority program funded by the German National research foundation. This special issue of the JASSS presents research results from five interdisciplinary projects of the Socionics program. The introduction gives an overview over the basic ideas of the Socionics approach and summarizes the work of these projects.Socionics, Sociology, Multi-Agent Systems, Artificial Social Systems, Hybrid Systems, Social Simulation