Friday, May 27, 2005

Agent-Based Modeling 

A GUIDE FOR NEWCOMERS TO AGENT-BASED MODELING
IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

"2. Agent-based modeling and the social sciences
The social sciences seek to understand not only how individuals behave but also how the interaction of many individuals leads to large-scale outcomes. Understanding a political or economic system requires more than an understanding of the individuals that comprise the system. It also requires understanding how the individuals interact with each other, and how the results can be more than the sum of the parts. ABM is well suited for this social science objective. It is a method for studying systems exhibiting the following two properties: (1) the system is composed of interacting agents; and (2) the system exhibits emergent properties, that is, properties arising from the interactions of the agents that cannot be deduced simply by aggregating the properties of the agents. When the interaction of the agents is contingent on past experience, and especially when the agents continually adapt to that experience, mathematical analysis is typically very limited in its ability to derive the dynamic consequences. In this case, ABM might be the only practical method of analysis."

This is all true of semantic systems as well. Semantics is an emergent coordination equilibrium among a population of agents. The real importance of Folksonomies is that they are the emergent results of iterative interactions of a society of human agents. Most designs for the semantic web so far lack this characteristic.

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