Re: Multiparticipant processes

          ...
           It's possible that there is always
          in principle a "correct" level of description from which all
          other
          representations can be derived, but (a) I doubt it; and (b)
          we seem to
          do fine with coarse-grained representations.

          My conclusion from these speculations is that egocentric
          representations are the obvious way to go until someone
          comes up with
          an important application of neutral representations, or
          shows that for
          some central special case (such as web services) you can
          derive the
          egocentric representations for all participants from a
          neutral
          representation.
          ...
Why do the egocentric  representations need to be derived from the
neutral representation?  It would be easier to abstract the
coarse-grained neutral representations from the more fine-grained
egocentric representations.

Perhaps I am missing your point, but I believe that multiple
abstractions will need to exist in almost any scenario (for the sake
of re-usability and extensibility, if not for the process itself), and
that multiple perspectives are nothing more than scoping the view to
an appropriate subset of the abstractions.

A domain which requires neutral representation is the military, where
process participants form a hierarchy.  For example, when "executing a
mission", the commander will monitor the process(es) from a
coarse-grained perspective.  Each of the officers "carrying out parts
of the mission", however, will need to monitor their more-detailed
respective process(es) from the perspective of their role in
"executing the mission". ... and on down to the actual warfighters ...
If a participant "encounters a problem", he/she has the option of
reasoning over the solution space from their perspective or
'drilling-down' to a more fine-grained view of the problem space.
I.e. A given participant's perspective may need to dynamically change.

Obviously, the egocentric representations have to exist and they need
to map into the neutral representation.

Marja

Received on Thursday, 4 October 2001 13:24:54 UTC