Bottom up Hierarchy --> CyberHumanity 1 comment

24 Apr 2004 @ 13:07, by Roger Eaton Nova Spivack has an important new article sharpening up some of his previous comments at New Version of My "Metaweb" Graph -- The Future of the Net. Danny Ayers has responded at Nova's Metaweb and Machine Consciousness. In Danny's article, if I read it aright, he takes issue with Nova's notion of "structures that provide virtual higher-order cognition and self-awareness to the network". In my view, which I think accords more with Danny's, Nova is speculating. Self-awareness and higher-order cognition may arise from basic structures plus scale instead of from structures built on structures as Nova seems to be thinking. However, Danny doesn't much like Nova's distinction between Social Software and Semantic Web, and seems to say that the Semantic Web encompasses the realm of Social Software. In my view, Nova's distinction is useful, as is his idea that Social Software and the Semantic Web can be synthesized as the MetaWeb. The voice of humanity (voh) notion of a "bottom up hierarchy" is relevant to the discussion in a couple of ways. First, a bottom up hierarchy is a basic structure which may well produce rather quickly the "higher order cognition and self-awareness" that Nova sees as fairly distant end-result of specialized structures. Second, because the bottom up hierarchy will be implemented person to person, it becomes the human scaffolding on which the semantic web can make its structures usable. We get something that I think both Danny and Nova are looking for, and that is the marriage of the human element and the computer element on a web-scale as a more fruitful endeavor than any merely AI type development. (See also Licklider's early articles mentioned in the discussion at Raw). So what is a voh "bottom up hierarchy"? Quoting from an earlier article, "Hub owners and other trusted users manually create long-term linkages between categories on a single hub or between pairs of hubs, specifying what items and ratings should be transferred, and how often. For each linkage, items may be exchanged in both directions, while ratings are always transferred in one direction only thus creating a hierarchy where the linked category that receives the ratings is above the hub/category that sends the ratings for that particular linkage. So the hierarchy is manually created one link at time by all the group moderators, and it is the direction of rating flow that indicates the hierarchy." For a more complete understanding, see the good discussion I had with Flemming Funch in the comments at Handling Collective Messages.

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Category: Link Review 

26 Apr 2004 @ 18:24 by Roger Eaton @204.250.12.246 : article at Many-to-Many
I have posted a comment to Clay Shirky's A City is not a Tree article. In one of the comments there, Shirky links to a long article about the book that is well worth reading. The point for design is that people think in terms of trees, but the general semilattice (which is defined in the long article) is much more suitable for living spaces -- including online networks, we can be sure.

The form of the voice of humanity as a bottom up hierarchy encourages the overlapping structures of the semilattice, just as an organically grown city does, as distinct from city with a top down design, which generally forms a tree pattern. Tree pattern cities are simpler and less livable than the general semilattice cities.  

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