[Sigia-l] Self organising Information

Tue Jun 28 09:48:12 EDT 2005

Hi Stewart,

You need to look for a book called "The Biology of Business"  which talks
precisely about what you refer to.  Certain systems  that are highly complex
behave in unpredictable ways (actually exceedingly difficult ways to
predict).  The weather and stock markets are examples.  Too many variables
and behaviors that are non linear (small change creates large fluctuations,
etc - "the butterfly effect").

However order can emerge out of chaos and energy is used to reverse entropy.
(If I break glass, I have created disorder.  If I melt the fragments and
mold them back I have created order with an input of energy).

The premise of self organization is that tags and labels on information
allow people to make sense of the information.  Collective action on that
information can allow greater meaning to emerge from the chaos.

That is a very short synopsis of the idea.  Read up on "Complex Adaptive
Systems"  and Complexity theory.  Knowledge is created at the edge of chaos
and control.  If there is too much control, order and rigidity, then there
is no experimentation and no new knowledge.  If there is totally anarchy,
nothing gets done. Creativity, new solutions and value emerge when there is
enough messiness in the system to allow for experimentation and then some
way of flagging those experiments that create favorable results.  Then the
people in the organization can build on those results and create new
knowledge.

(When I say experiment, I am also referring to trial and error in any
business function.  Marketing programs, business plans, product development,
etc.)

By they way, I'll take a moment to answer the question to another post about
background and training for IA.  My undergraduate was biology and chemistry
and graduate in business.  (How apropos to this post... First time I've seen
anything logical or relevant about my education and field. )

In Biology of Business, John Clippinger suggests that information flows
based on the tags and labels that are applied.  In any organization we are
trying to encourage flows of knowledge. (Knowledge being an odd resource in
that the only way it has value is when it is used - unlike traditional
resources of money, time and material).  So the goal of a manager is to
encourage flows through correct tagging.  Tags provide the handles on
information so that people can find and apply it to the problem at hand.  Of
course that just covers explicit knowledge (the stuff written down) tacit
knowledge is transferred from person to person (or back and forth to written
form, etc) and the ways this is done is through social networks.  I am
getting a little off track here but this is another important aspect of
emergent knowledge.  As John Seeley Brown writes in "Social Life of
Information" , documents have a social context (which is actually one of the
tags on a written document).

At any rate, there are some very practical aspects that we are seeing with
this and the possible emergence of order from the disorder of collaborative
tagging ("folksonomies").  As these evolve and once someone figures out how
to filter and make sense of the collective wisdom of these processes we'll
see some very powerful applications.  (These will likely be community of
practice specific and internal to organizations in application).

Seth

Seth Earley
Earley & Associates, Inc
781-444-0287
781-820-8080 cell
Next taxo conference call June 29th 2 PM EDT
"Case Examples in Deriving a Taxonomy"
Registration and agenda at
www.earley.com/events.htm
Taxonomy Community of Practice
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxoCoP

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org]On
Behalf Of Stewart Dean
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2005 8:34 AM
To: Jan.Jursa at init.de; sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] Self organising Information (Was Data as Information)

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

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