Re: Fractal communities: Was: Rich semantics and expressiveness

Dear all,

From our point of view, and as a result of the first study of the
Semantic Web from the Complex Systems point of view [1] that we
carried out some years ago, the Semantic Web already behaves like a
Complex System. This is common to other decentralised information
systems but also to most living systems structures. This implies a
fractal nature, among other interesting properties like preferential
attachment or .

We don't think that this structure must be imposed during ontology
design or that it can be achieved through monolithical upper
ontologies. We think that this structure will naturally emerge as a
result of connecting them to the network of ontologies that should
constitute the core of the Semantic Web. And this can be achieved
following a simple rule "do not reinvent the wheel", i.e. reuse as
many existing ontologies as possible, from abstract to domain specific
ones.

On the other hand, the value of such studies is to be aware of this
underlying complex system behaviour and take profit from it in order
to designing highly scalable Semantic Web solutions. For instance, in
order to detect the key nodes in the subnetwork of interest (called
hubs) that might facilitate understanding among agent operating in
such subdomain.

From our point of view, the Semantic Web establishes the technologies
and methodologies that facilitate building information systems that
naturally adopt a fractal structure and that show a complex system
behaviour. And, what is most important, millions of years of evolution
have demonstrated that this is the optimal structure for really
complex systems (like food webs, protein networks, our own brain and
even our language).

Best regards,

Roberto García
http://rhizomik.net/~roberto

[1] Living Semantic Web, http://rhizomik.net/livingsw

Received on Monday, 5 March 2007 09:10:10 UTC