usually in the form of extremely context sensitive parameter definitions. Consider the set of applications that one might routinely utilize on one’s personal computer; a word processing system, a presentation tool, an e-mail tool, a calendar system, a Web browser, perhaps a spreadsheet application and sometimes a variety of databases containing context sensitive information. Even when they’re obtained from a single vendor, each of these applications typically has control facilities that are unique. If obtained from different vendors, the likelihood that they will utilize similar control mappings to the human sensori-motor system is minimal. Rarely do the controlling parameter sets have well thought-out grammars or semantic definitions. The result is that interactions within different application infrastructures make use of these highly specialized languages, and this use tends to limit, if not completely prohibit the systematic negotiation and application of effective policy to be applied among all parties to a transaction. Moreover, these ad hoc mechanisms provide little coherence among different application infrastructures and rarely facilitate effective semantic transfer between people and the computers they interact with, including their identification tokens. So, a central need for a comprehensive policy infrastructure is a reference model that defines the semantics to be expressed by a commonly understood language. As we discussed in some detail in Chapter 8, cognition languages can express sensori-motor metaphors in such a fashion as to allow computers to reason about them. They are based on a comprehensive semantic data model that defines the elements of the metaphoric information in question. This model is an ontology, the representation that we discussed in Chapters 5 and 6.

The most wide ranging activity engaged in the construction of a general-purpose ontology is that of the Semantic Web. This a derivative of the World Wide Web proposed by Tim Berners-Lee as part of his early architectural work on the Web itself. While we will attempt to provide the right flavor of how a formal model of a social ecosystem looks like, we will again emphasize that we are simplifying drastically the formalism of the description for reasons of readability. Also, we need to say that while we are comfortable in the simplifications regarding the formalization itself, as it is within our domain of core competence, we want to consider the examples as more tentative, as the social evaluation of political system is less of our specialty, and we’ll need to leave to others the tasks of confirming or infirming our analysis. In order to minimize our chances of error though, we have followed very closely the model of Montesquieu in The Spirit of The Laws, in particular Books XXIV and XXV on the rapport of laws and religion. Our point here is to highlight the digital representation of social ecosystems; we certainly hope that the model we are presenting is strong enough in its general line so that further elaboration will bring even more strength to the presentation.

The top architecture looks as follows:

For example, we can choose to describe Islam’s theocratic state organizations as:

The United States systems of government would look first as:

Book available at Midori Press (regular)
Book available at Midori Press (signed)
Book available at Amazon (regular)