[Sigia-l] Self organising Information (Was Data as Information)

[Stewart Dean]

Hi Jan,

I read your message and it's reminded me of a theory I'm still fleshing out. 
This gets a bit nebulous so forgive me if it appears a bit, well, strange.

In many ways information and energy are related which comes over in Shannons 
work. Life, for example, is governed by what is best described as 'rate of 
change' - something that is covered by the area of artificial life - or 
complex systems / complexity / self organising systems, pick the term you're 
happiest with.

Life requires the right amount of change to work, and it needs a particular 
form of organisation, one where it can organise energy (and information) 
using existing energy/information. To low a rate of change leads to either a 
static or cyclical system, like sailing a ship with no wind or tide, to high 
and things just break down into chaos, like trying to sail a ship in a 
extreme storm.

Computers are mostly static and cyclical - they require being poked with a 
stick to do anything, like the web sites most of build (updating prices isnt 
really dynamic, it's just a simple reaction from a feed).

You brought up entropy. Yep we're fighting entropy - fighting things getting 
too static or too chaotic. The reason why we're all in a job is that this is 
a never ending fight - as long as things change, regardless of the rate of 
change, things need to be updated.

So comes my theory - how about self organising sites?  I'm not really 
talking about personalisation, or collaborative filtering (you have to admit 
it doesnt work that well for the effort users have to put into it) nor am I 
talking about Wikis - which start getting close. I'm talking about 
information that feeds of the energy of user interaction to organise it's 
self and remains usable. In essence a library that needs no librarians, only 
readers.  I think it's possible but am time poor, so to speak.

I've heard people use the term bottom up IA but these come short of true 
bottom up systems (the BBCs approach, for example,  is fundamentally top 
down due to their use of an evolved dublin core).

I can't help think someone has tried to do this before but can anyone think 
of examples?  Or do you feel I still have some explaining to do?

Cheers

Stewart Dean



>From: "Jursa, Jan (init)" <Jan.Jursa at init.de>
>To: "sigia l" <sigia-l at asis.org>
>Subject: [Sigia-l] data as information?
>Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 09:29:37 +0200
>
>
>Though nullius in verba seems to be the motto of this list :-) - there
>is nothing wrong to familiarise oneself with elementary theories, before
>renaming given terms.
>
>See for example "The Mathematical Theory of Communication", published in
>1948, by Shannon/Weaver (the fathers of information theory).
>
>Some statement from Shannon and Weaver (how I learned them):
>"information turns out to be exactly that which is known in
>thermodynamics as entropy"
>"In particular, information must not be confused with meaning"
>
>so, as I understand it. data holds three kinds of things: Information,
>Redundancy and Noise.
>
>Regarding the fundamental definition of "information" in the information
>theory, I'd like to think of an IA as of someone who tries to remove the
>amount on Entropy in a given environment...
>
>What do you think?
>
>Cheers,
>Jan